Understandable
I think people are being too harsh against the buyers in this story.
I often need to purchase things through the internet with my credit card, and I assume a certain level of protection against getting ripped off.
For example, I bought £500 of bamboo from a website. Now all I had to go on were a bunch of pictures that some guy could have ripped off from some other website. Sometimes you need to assume they are telling the truth, rather than calling them up and asking them to bang the phone against the bamboo pots so you can hear that they are real.
Just like I don't have the time or inclination to go out and research bamboo to death before I buy it (they could have made up the bamboo names and photoshopped the pictures for all I know), the same goes for people that fancy an iPhone but don't feel like researching the situation for countless hours.
The businesses that accept credit cards understand that it isn't so easy to set up, there are some security measures in place. Lloyds inspected my business carefully before they allowed me to take credit cards, and when I was younger and wanted to set up a different website business my request to take credit cards was simply refused by all banks due to lack of track record. As you can see from this story, the police know exactly who did this - if it was so easy to rip people off then nobody would know who ran the website, or where the money had gone to.