@Zachariah... you have a large experience on the web market, you learned... and i'm sure you are not surprised by the lack of knowledge from the clients here that are not aware of all these details...

most of the time, forum owners are completely newbies about freelancers market and how to protect themselves...

one of the thing that was done lately was to add some stickies inside the paid services forum, but it is completely useless, because nobody read the stickies... a efficient alert in red and bold on top of the "New Thread" page would give some hints to everybody... basic rules like "never pay before you see the result"... "ask for a protected transaction on paypal or escrow systems"...

we can't rate coders who do a job here... and as an example of non-interventionism, even after 5 or 6 complaints about Mr. X inside the requests for jobs, there is nothing done about him... he is an example because someone complained about him today again... but there is more of these guys that are stealing people just because we are an opened community...

maybe the only solution will be to have a commercial website for vBulletin coders... actually Jelsoft is against it... someone can act on it...