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The status quo may not be perfect but it is the best we can do. We try to educate people about scams. We give them warnings that what they are doing can be dangerous if misused. If they choose to ignore those things and proceed anyway, the only further step society could take is to take away the person's freedom to choose. And that is an unacceptable solution.
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Society takes away individual's freedom to choose all the time. You can't choose not to pay your taxes. You can't choose to board a passenger plane without passing a security check. You can't just get a loan without any guarantees to the bank etc.

Education isn't really working at this global scale. It doesn't reach people the way you seem to belive it does. Many, if not most people are generally disinterested in learning new things and this gets amplified when it involves technology.

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> The status quo may not be perfect but it is the best we can do.

Nope. We could, for example, ask developers to register with their legal identity to release apps.

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That would be worse than the status quo.
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the open source community should ask for their own install key and that's it

Play store can be fast and verification based and the F/OSS stores can be slower, reputation and review based.

...

But fundamentally the easiest thing is to ask people to pay to unlock the phone's security barriers, this makes it harder and costlier for scammers.

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