Comment by Guvante
21 hours ago
Are they actually legal?
Generally those kind of scams setup an illegitimate transaction that would be reversed in a court case.
Whether they rise to a criminal matter is complicated but the vast majority of such scams hold up to scrutiny and instead rely on shell games to make retrieving your funds to expensive to be possible.
Legality is a matter of enforcement, not of legislation
Germany follows the law extremely strictly, even more than the USA. If there's no law that says they can't do this, they can do it. Common sense rarely enters the picture in German legal battles
In the US these kinds of scam fail to be legal on the basis of contract law which is way more nuanced than "can't do this"...
I am not talking about common sense I am talking about things like informed consent and consideration.
German law doesn't really care if your consent to a contract was informed or not. If you technically consented, then you consented. This is also how we got the recent thread about .at domains renewing automatically and the registry suing you if you don't pay.
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