[insta_anon]

I have a hard time trying to understand why governments don’t address these scams more proactively.

There is a related issue when you register a new company here in Germany: As soon as the new entity is added to the company house (called “Handelsregister”), you will start to receive fake invoices from scam companies.

These invoice look very similar to official ones and some even use the official seal of the state (see https://www.firma.de/en/company-formation/beware-of-fake-han... for examples).

If you don’t pay close attention you can easily mistake these invoice for official ones.

This scam is quite well-known and has been going on for years. To further add to the insult - the companies that send these fake invoices are usually German entities as well, not some obscure shell companies in remote islands and yet besides warnings from the government it seems that little is happening.

I find it infuriating and don’t understand why it is even allowed to send another party that you never had any relation with an invoice for a service that you actually haven’t performed yet.

[TeMPOraL]

There's a similar scam in place in Poland, and its continued existence confuses me too. I don't remember getting any invoices after registering my company, but I got spammed with letters telling me to pay a fee to register my company on some listing, and some of those messages did their best to make it seem they're a continuation of the official process. The deception goes as far as these companies being named in a way that sounds government-ish, and their addresses being at the same street in Warsaw (the capital) some government buildings are.

The infuriating part is that it's so well-known, that both the physical government offices and the online forms where you can register your small business, are plastered with big, attention-grabbing reminders that the registration process is free. The government knows about this scam to the point of warning people about it, and yet it continues.

[nneonneo]

Well, the FTC is _trying_, at least. They took action against On Point Global (https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases-proceedings/x130054/po...) which operated a big network of DMV-lookalike sites. If you tried to Google for renewing your drivers license, you'd get sent to one of these sites, which looked like it would help you renew your license but would actually just charge you approx. $15 to download a PDF guide on how to use the real government website.

There's a certain threshold of complaints, unfortunately. The FTC only has the resources to go after big fish. But, one thing I did learn from reading the FTC complaint is that credit card chargebacks do work, after a fashion; the company was getting repeatedly booted off of merchant accounts for accruing lots of chargebacks. I bet if people aggressively charged back the EIN scammers it'd end up hurting them too.

[bluGill]

That invoice scam is why big companies have such complex expense report systems. They need to verify every transaction is real so they can match up real invoices to. I'm more or less trusted to buy $5000 worth of stuff at a time (number is somewhat random, but this covers most travel expense). However they still need to check because if they just pay all bills someone will send a bill in my name (easy to find out a name of someone who works for a company - my name would be chance, but likely enough) even though I didn't buy anything in the companies name.

[jokethrowaway]

Because the government doesn't have an economic incentive dealing with small fraud.

That's not what decides elections. If there is too much crime that can be an extra excuse to raise more taxes.

I reported frauds to the police in two cases and they didn't do anything despite having all the evidence and location of the perpetrators (even after arresting one of them in one case).

A civil case didn't work as well because they owned nothing on paper.

The only way to get justice is to pay someone to break their knees or steal what they stole from you from them.

[varispeed]

My theory is that since those crimes are non violent, there is a silent approval, as long as there is no massive public outrage and associated PR costs for a government. The reasoning is that the cost to the society is lower than if you were going to process those people through legal system and then keep them in jail.

If these crimes were costing the society more than keeping perpetrators locked up then situation would have changed. Another reason is that some people, by their nature, just cannot have a "normal" job and so they hustle. If you take away non-violent options, then there is a chance they'd turn to something violent to achieve their goals and that would be costly.

[minikites]

Why is this the job of the government and not Google for sending people to the wrong site? They have a massive responsibility in their role as the directory for the internet and they need to take it seriously.

[alisonkisk]

Who it would make it Google's job? Only the government or customers can.