It is fraud. However, one thing has become crystal clear lately is that laws are only as good as we have systems in place that are willing and able to enforce them.

And further, scamming people in the context of sex has always been easy because of the shame in admitting you fell for it.

Imagine filing a report that you spent thousands of dollars chatting with some random person, having the chat logs submitted as evidence, etc. it’s similar to why all types of sexual assault are rarely reported

> laws are only as good as we have systems in place that are willing and ABLE to enforce them.

The 'able' part is the critical insight. Laws are too often passed that really have no ability to be enforced, but end up adding bureaucratic processes that law abiding companies have to follow. This also implies that governments need to actively clean up existing laws, which almost never happens unless there is enough support to pass a new law to actively supplant the old one.

> because of the shame in admitting you fell for it.

I would argue that the reason has more to do with our utter inability to create common sense laws regarding anything "sex".