"Everything about me is fake... and I'm perfect", Janice Dickinson, Amazon.com.
Consider the validity of this quip in respect of cyberspace patronage. Does this spell doom for electronic commerce on the internet?
Dickinson's quip, applied to cyberspace, raises a question of trust: if the internet permits anyone to be entirely fake, can commerce conducted wholly on it survive?42 In this paper, I will be arguing that the quip is valid but doom does not follow, and I recommend reforms to the Electronic Transactions Act for the cases its protections cannot reach.
The Internet and Its Anonymity
The internet is a web of interconnected networks whose open standards let anyone connect and trade without approval from a central authority.43 Traffic moves in packets labelled with Internet Protocol addresses, and an IP address identifies a machine, never the person using it.44 Anonymity follows from this design: in real space it must be created, while in cyberspace it is the given,45 a place where nobody knows you are a dog.46 Fake content therefore travels as smoothly as genuine content, and a fabricated shop displays exactly like an honest one.
Defining the Electronic Transaction
The protections at stake attach to the electronic transaction, a term Act 772 applies to dealings concluded on an electronic platform yet defines it insufficiently.47 European law elucidates it. Under the Consumer Rights Directive, a distance contract is concluded under an organised scheme, without the parties ever being physically present, through distance communication alone,48 and recital 20 spells this out with precision, never generality.49 On that definition a sale concluded wholly by telephone qualifies, yet the question confines itself to internet commerce. The narrowing matters, because there the buyer's entire knowledge of the seller is a screen that can be fabricated. In Gentry v eBay, buyers of forged memorabilia recovered nothing from the platform, which was not responsible for content its users posted.50 Section 90 of Act 772 gives Ghanaian intermediaries similar immunity,51 and the platforms disclaim the rest by contract, denying they are parties to the sale at all.5253
Information as the Weapon
Ghana's response is compelled disclosure. Section 47 forces the supplier to publish its identity, address, price and refund policy where goods are offered.54 Sections 48 and 49 add supply deadlines and cooling-off rights,55 sections 50 to 52 shield the consumer from spam and payment abuse,56 and sections 53 and 54 make the scheme mandatory, voiding any term that excludes it, a direct answer to the platform disclaimers.57 The law does not remove fakeness; it floods the transaction with compelled truth.
Compliance is not honesty. A fraudster can supply every item section 47 demands and fabricate everything, as Gentry's sellers did. The intermediary the buyer trusts owes no duty under section 90. Disclosure assumes a reader, and foreign traders sit beyond practical enforcement.
These gaps lead me to recommend responses in law and technology. In law, Act 772 should bind marketplaces with the section 47 duties and adopt the Korean model of consumer-elective escrow for prepaid internet purchases, with compensation insurance as the supplier's alternative and small payments exempt.58 In technology, platforms should build that escrow into Ghana's mobile money rails, releasing payment only on confirmed delivery. Sellers should be verified against the national identity register, and a clean record should ease them out of escrow. Escrow makes performance the proof the law has been chasing. The quip is valid; doom does not follow, because a buyer who pays only for what arrives has nothing to fear from fakeness.