I would, if the police were filling that particular niche. As most police departments have limited funds, simple economics steers them to putting their resources on the highest impact cases. So "Some guy defrauded me when {buying|selling} an iPhone." is below the activation threshold for the police.
But investigating these "small time" frauds benefits from scale. And like the company that was fixing parking tickets (normally a time consuming and costly exercise for the ticket receiver) by apply resources across a lot of people with parking tickets, I could imagine an equivalent "fraud fighter" business where the "fee" was 1/2 the recovered value. So the company investigates 1000 fraudulent amazon sales in the greater New York area, lets say they can prove half the time that it was fraud and get the appropriate fraud protection coverage to kick in. If they keep 50% of that value, they have now a revenue stream that is 25% of the defrauded value.
The mechanic here is that small time fraud allows millions (maybe billions) to be siphoned out of the commercial shopping stream. That burden is generally born by the sellers who raise prices to cover their losses. If a startup can mitigate those losses by 50%, and the seller is willing to split the mitigation 50/50 with the startup, then the seller has 25% less "loss due to fraud" and the startup has 25% of revenue from defeating fraud. It takes money out of the fraud pipeline.
When larger fraud rings are uncovered by the startup they can hand them off to the police who are willing to go after multi-million dollar criminal enterprises.
But investigating these "small time" frauds benefits from scale. And like the company that was fixing parking tickets (normally a time consuming and costly exercise for the ticket receiver) by apply resources across a lot of people with parking tickets, I could imagine an equivalent "fraud fighter" business where the "fee" was 1/2 the recovered value. So the company investigates 1000 fraudulent amazon sales in the greater New York area, lets say they can prove half the time that it was fraud and get the appropriate fraud protection coverage to kick in. If they keep 50% of that value, they have now a revenue stream that is 25% of the defrauded value.
The mechanic here is that small time fraud allows millions (maybe billions) to be siphoned out of the commercial shopping stream. That burden is generally born by the sellers who raise prices to cover their losses. If a startup can mitigate those losses by 50%, and the seller is willing to split the mitigation 50/50 with the startup, then the seller has 25% less "loss due to fraud" and the startup has 25% of revenue from defeating fraud. It takes money out of the fraud pipeline.
When larger fraud rings are uncovered by the startup they can hand them off to the police who are willing to go after multi-million dollar criminal enterprises.