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Smart enough to do it, dumb enough to do it also. It's more common than it seems like it ought to be.

Of course there's the "follow the money" issue, I wonder if it's doable using a payment provider in a dubious country, or if Visa/Mastercard would just chargeback, leaving the payment provider to be mad at you (but hopefully they did poor KYC so they'd have no power to send their henchmen to you).

Maybe the fake app can say "Now you need to go to walmart.com to buy a gift card and enter that gift card code's to pay for parking", but that would filter out a lot of people who was looking for convenience in the first place. If I were consulting for this criminal, I'd say "You need to get to their greed by offering them a big prize, e.g. 1 year free parking in $CITY...".

The truth is that even though it's technically possible to follow the money and all the paper trail is there, in some countries law enforcement doesn't seem to be bothered to investigate things at all (even when reported by a bank for fraud/money laundering suspicions) from my experience.

These scammers are either smart and done everything anonymously, or too stupid to understand how this can all be tracked, but unfortunately this stupidity does often end up paying off.

It might also be indirect: dumb criminal pays smart hacker to build website, in cash.

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