It's also that the fraud is incredibly diluted. Is the solution a class-action lawsuit? If so, is it even worth it to me to fill out the postcard for a tube of bogus aloe I bought 2 years ago? Let's say someone actually told me it was fake. Was it the "Wal-Mart Premium Aloe" or the "Wal-Mart Organic Aloe"? I would happily pay $0.20 more for real aloe over fake, but I'm not going to spend 20min on my phone then pay $0.20 more for each item I put in my cart.
Which brand of olive oil isn't the fake one, again?
Legal scholars have actually found many elegant solutions to this sort of stuff.
The simplest one is that if you find out that you were the victim of small scale fraud. You should be able to sell your claim to a third person. This third person can then gather many small claim and do the lawsuit for profit. Your claim might only be worth 10$ in this case (since this is just wrong labeling and not anything worse) but its still free money.
This system would also give consumer groups for example a better financial situation. Currently, fines usually go to the government if some group detects that some law was abused. In the system im talking about a consumer group could ask for the data of all the people, should the find something they inform everybody of this and ask them to sell their claims. Then they sue the producer and make a profit. Such system could essentially be automated. Selling a claim should not be harder then making online bank payments (in Switzerland we have E-Bills, pops up, 1-click, done). If you trust the consumer group you could just automate it completely (in Switzerland you can actually give access to your bank accounts companies you trust).
This is also not some new idea, there are historical systems that worked exactly like this. Those system were found to perform quite well.
That's a simplistic conclusion. If the legal system is the right answer, but the existing legal system does not perform the function, then it might be important to reform the legal system and not change everything else.
In a better legal system it should be easy, for all defrauded people to somehow make money.
Libertarian and other people have actually studied these issues quite in depth and there are many good proposals. A simply version is that if you are victim of fraud but you don't want to take action, you can sell your claim to somebody else. In this case we have many small claims, one actor can buy them up and then make a collective action lawsuit without everybody else having to care.
