I think it's incredibly sad how much regulators let PayPal, Ebay, Apple, and Google get away with in regards to facilitating scammers. Right now PayPal has a lo

I think it's incredibly sad how much regulators let PayPal, Ebay, Apple, and Google get away with in regards to facilitating scammers. Right now PayPal has a loophole in their policies regarding "significantly not as described" claims that leave scammers using the same account for years at a time and winning most disputes against their victims and PayPal is content to collect their fees and help them get away with it. The scammer will set up some cookie cutter web store claiming to sell items with product descriptions and images copied from genuine retailers but instead of sending you the item pictured, they'll send you whatever the cheapest crap they could dropship from aliexpress is. The site will claim "sold and ships from USA" but whenever the dispute comes in they'll submit the tracking info from China, and whenever that arrives a month or two later the only option through PayPal's policies is a SNAD claim and PayPal will side with the scammer unless you ship the crap to their return address in Beijing in some unrealistic time frame at your own cost. Shipping it back to the scammer internationally for a consumer will cost more than they were scammed out of to begin with so no one is even going to bother with it and even if they did, why would you trust that the scammer would be willing to lose the dispute instead of continuing the lie when PayPal is oh-so-willing to bury their head in the sand and ignore the fraud? The majority of scams targeting people to convince them to give them money don't try and get the victim to give them a credit card, mail cash, or wire some funds. They have shifted heavily to using iTunes gift cards and Google Play gift cards because even though that surely makes it look incredibly obvious that it's a scam, enough victims still fall for it and in the end even after losing some victims, paying hefty 30% platform fees, and paying another party to launder their funds they still come out ahead compared to traditional methods. If you've ever had an acquaintance who has fallen for these scams a common theme is that even if the victim or someone close to the victim calls Apple immediately after the scam, they'll be told "Sorry the money is already gone, there's nothing to refund" even though every last cent is still sitting in Apple's bank account, it's just been moved from the gift card balance to some shifty app developer because clearly the scammers just wanted to buy $500 worth of collectible items in a game nearly no one has ever heard of. https://i.imgur.com/oijXbLD.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/oijXbLD.jpeg I really wish regulators would get their act together and stop letting these companies pretend like the fraud they're facilitating isn't their problem.