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They're both forms of fraud. The gift card one is misrepresenting their position to trick you into giving them money. The house scam is misrepresenting your position to trick them into giving them something worth more than the money they give you. The only difference is that when they misrepresent you, it is expected that you be aware of your own situation such that you will be treated as though you gave informed consent, even if you didn't. It's analogous to the difference between someone sexually assaulting you by pretending to be a doctor vs never promising to be a doctor but telling you how sick you look and how they're no expert but they'd be willing to condescend to feel around inside your undies as a favor to you. The only people who accept the offer have to be so dumb, desperate, intentionally misinformed, or some combination of all three as to be essentially incapable of informed consent.
I would say the line between the two is found in desperation.
If I'm in the middle of nowhere and run out of gas, I wouldn't be happy paying some guy $50 for a gallon of gas to get me to the next station, but it serves my needs, and of course I'd have spent less had I planned better, but this guy got me out of a tough situation.
If some other guy gives me the same offer, but then runs off with my money and gives me no gas. I'm out the money AND I'm still screwed.
Fuck that guy twice as hard as the first guy.
I'd take it as both being 'past the line' regardless of distance. If someone is seeking to defraud people, I don't care whether their targets are made easier by desperation or not. The guy effectively robbing you is bad, but that doesn't mean the guy price-gouging you isn't. He didn't help you out of a bad situation. He moved you from one bad situation to another. They are both harming you, and both would be prevented from doing it again in any just system.
Yeah, I guess. I'm not saying a paper cut is a good thing, I'm just saying it's better than a broken femur.
If your stance is that everything bad is equally the worst thing ever, that's your perspective and I hope it serves you well.
I'm not saying worst thing ever. I'm not catastrophizing. I'm not saying equal. They are different things. I'm saying unacceptable. I'm saying extent, though extant, is irrelevant to the question of acceptability.
This is an important point that keeps coming up in a thousand places and a thousand ways. The fact a femur can be broken does not make the papercut meaningless, acceptable, or excused any more than the fact someone can torture you and your loved ones for days on end could mean it's acceptable to 'only' break your femur. If we try to scale measurement of harm in relation to 'what might have been,' attempted murder is completely acceptable as long as it fails, successful single murder is negligible as long as mass killings are possible, mass killings are fine as long as genocides are possible, and so on, and so on... You do not want to live in a world which takes the idea of 'at least it's not...' seriously.