In a free market without regulation ‘calling out scammers’ is ineffective.

It takes 100 times more effort to convince someone to avoid a scam than it does to convince someone to fall for one.

To worsen the disadvantage, the scammer gets paid whereas educators do not.

So what’s the solution?

Direct your energy into educating people about bitcoin & improving bitcoin tools.

Some people are going to get scammed, you can try and fight this but for the reasons explained above it’s a lost cause. Eventually they will get burned and will start looking at bitcoin again. When they do, be ready to get them up to speed with best practices quickly.

I point newcomers at bitcoin-intro.com and encourage you to fork the project and modify it as you see fit (would be great to make pull requests upstream if you have any good ideas)

After they are a few lessons deep I suggest they take a look through bitcoin-only.com to find other useful and interesting things you can use bitcoin for.

The easier it is for users to operate under “best practices” the more robust bitcoin becomes.

Spot a problem / difficulty / area of improvement with some bitcoin software?

Make specific and actionable suggestions to those writing the code, or write it yourself.

An old axe can be honed and sharpened to make it easier to achieve your goal of cutting down a tree. Similarly the way to help people adopt bitcoin is to help build and refine the tools available.