[dabean]

I presume your refering to a FBI study saying 97.3% of fraudulent orders are coming from free-service email addresses.

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies are not problems when sufficient checks are put in place and a script is designed to comply with local/international laws for the US this is currently "Allowing the retrival of stored email through an administrative subpoena, which does not require a judge's signature, that is sent to a company or Internet provider and when law enforcement asks an Internet provider to disclose email content or other electronic communications, the person under investigation must be notified at the same time the warrant is served."

The big providers have problems partly because of the widespread use of their domain names. I'm sure you've seen how some people just make up <somethingcool>@hotmail.com for forms and how most spammers seem to use aol or hotmail or yahoo addresses, and also because at one point they did not require personal information and what little information they collect wasn't fully validated.