In all seriousness... how do you protect naive people from scams like this? I guess my despair is that: you might protect them from this obvious scam. What if the scam is a little more polished?
I think this kinda thing will always happen to gullible folks. I'm not sure what the solution is.
Only if we are willing to say the same once someone decides to fight back with actual force. If someone outright kills a scammer doing this, are you willing to write it off as "Darwin's law" and let it be?
In this case, you stop government enforcing the scam.
You could say "Darwin", anyone dumb enough to get eaten deserves it.
But you could also say "anything that eats people is gonna get shut down hard", because you don't get to be at the top of the food chain if you let things keep eating you.