Assistant Professor
University of Nebraska College of Law
This talk will discuss methods for combating online fraud, focusing on private lawsuits and governmental enforcement efforts. Private lawsuits offer a decentralized approach to policing "dark patterns" and other techniques for online fraud and are able to quickly leverage individuals' ground-level knowledge and private resources. However, the deterrent effect of private lawsuits is limited in the context of small-scale, heterogenous harms and where scammers operate from outside jurisdictions — contexts where governmental enforcement resources can most usefully be allocated to augment private efforts. Such coordinated public-private enforcement can effectively tackle digital deception with less risk of stifling innovation than regulations targeting particular technologies or techniques of deception.