Online car shopping is already too much for me, not to mention online real estate flipping. How one dares to buy a house without looking at it in his own eyes is really beyond me.

Online flipping is happening in economically distressed cities in New York, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The practice, local government leaders say, is destabilizing already weakened urban neighborhoods by displacing legitimate investment.

Buffalo has been particularly hard hit by online flipping, as the city's persistent population decline and high foreclosure rates have created a glut of some 20,000 vacant houses.

"Ninety-nine percent of these online ads have some kind of fraud or lies," said Tracy Krug, a building inspector in Buffalo. "They paint a nice rosy picture: 'on a bus line, near a nice market.' They don't tell you you're going to be across the street from a crack house."

Safeguards that protect buyers, like state laws requiring disclosures about a property's condition, are rarely effective when the transaction is online. Although such laws apply to most transactions, online or not, a long-distance buyer will not necessarily know about them.

This might help explain why Greg Tanner, who says he has a knack for "turning one dollar into two dollars," is now more than $30,000 in debt.