I agree, though education is number one for protection but it doesn’t help so much if a total newbie. Blockchain validators could have a sort of antivirus for malicious contracts where they have a blacklist of contracts that render them useless if clicked on, so there will never be full approved confirmation on chain. A step further which may be quite hard to do could be to find a common string of variables in the code that only dodgy code would do and have that become blacklisted or will require the scammers to pay a far higher cost to create those malicious contracts discouraging them to move elsewhere or give up.
But like always a multi prong approach is best, with wallets also helping by adding further confirmations of warnings with extra steps to click and inform. I think in the future AI will be very helpful to scan the contract and give a score of risk due to trust, their frequency of use and the code itself.
We can definitely do better because atm the scammers have free rein and are loving it this should be cracked down on to make it much harder to steal others money through a contract. Even if there is a auditing processes before deployment as default or a extra feature which would give more trust to those contracts. Of course none of this will ever apply to general transactions so it’s still as decentralized as it was before, we just need to make it much harder for those bastards
Many scammers operate out of groups. I believe scammers attract negativity in some way either externally or internally, they often end up hurting themselves in the end, it may take a decade or longer when they realize or they attract that negativity externally. If they are too cold to ever care they are not the type of miserable person you would ever want to be or to ever be associated with. They are scum they know it, they may try to justify it at times but they know. Just talking in general because your comment was innocent sarcasm that some will see inappropriate due to the situation