> All the automated or manual safeguards that Google could enact would never prevent people from pulling a fast one,

This is a copout. Nobody ask Google to review the source code of each app uploaded. There are plenty of basic things google could put in place to make sure blatant fraud doesn't happen. But they don't, because they don't care or don't want to allocate resources to anything that doesn't have a high return on investment. And since the competition virtually does not exist...