WASHINGTON--A fact in the retail community is that stores will continue to battle shoplifting, but "let me be clear, ORC is not shoplifting," said Karl Langhorst, director of loss prevention at Randalls/Tom Thumb Food and Pharmacy, during a congressional hearing on organized retail crime last week.

The retail community pushed its fight against organized retail crime and e-fencing onto a national platform when experts testified before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security to suggest ways law enforcement, retailers and online auction sites can work together to decrease the billions of dollars lost annually to crime rings. The hearing comes as Congress is preparing to introduce new federal legislation to crack down on ORC.

Langhorst, along with Brad Brekke, vice president of assets protection for Target Corp.; David Hill, detective with the Montgomery County Police Department; and Robert Chestnut, senior vice president of rules, trust and safety for eBay each gave a five-minute testimony on the issue to the committee over the hour and one-half session that focused on the lack of regulations geared toward the online sale of stolen goods.

Brekke commended the committee chairman for recognizing "this evolving problem" and noted that compounding this problem is an increasing number of auction sites that facilitate the sale of stolen property.

"As the problem has grown, our industry has invested tens of millions of dollars to combat the problem," he said. "But the Internet marketplace has dramatically transformed the fencing of stolen property."

Fencing use to be a face-to-face process, Brekke said, but with the emergence of online sites, such as auction site eBay and classified listing Craig's List, has created a worldwide market for stolen goods.

"Sellers are anonymous and buyers are unaware of the source of the product," he said. "The enormous profits of the crime have fueled criminal activity that hurts our communities."

Chestnut said eBay recognizes ORC as a serious challenge for retailers and the company takes all forms of illegal activity seriously, but said eBay has the most proactive policy of any Internet company. He said 2,000 employees work around the globe to combat fraudulent activity on its site.

"eBay is the dumbest place for people to sell stolen property," he said.

But Brekke said auction sites need to make simple changes including identifying high-volume sellers and adding serial numbers to product listings to reduce the sale of stolen, and, possibly unsafe, goods on the sites. Brekke pointed out that eBay Motors requires vehicle identification numbers with any vehicle sale, which has cut back on the listing of stolen automobiles.

But eBay's Chestnut said posting numerical identifications on products might not be the answer. He said eBay Motors checks VINs in a national database like CarFax to determine a vehicle's history. Currently, Chestnut said, there is no national database to run stolen merchandise through.

"We have no issue at all with implementing a serial number check where it would do some good," he said. "But in this situation, I'm not sure it would help."

Chestnut said there are privacy concerns with giving out the contact information of its sellers -- if retailers are concerned about a particular seller, he said LP teams can easily purchase a product from the seller and then get the seller's contact information.

Joseph LaRocca, vice president of loss prevention for the National Retail Federation, said the bottom line is that there needs to be regulations in place and they need to be enforced.

"The big picture is retailers need some action on the part of online auctions sites to look at this very select group of power sellers," he said. "It is not about all of eBay changing -- it is about identifying these power sellers that are selling multiples of targeted items and providing their information to retailers."

Langhorst said despite best efforts, retailers continue to suffer significant losses. He said there needs to be "strong federal legislation" developed that defines ORC and holds online auction sites accountable to the sale of stolen property.

"It would be nice to have some regulations in place to limit this to begin with," he said. "Then we'd have loss prevention instead of loss reaction."