Couldn't you just "rebalance" the JPEG artifacts as a final pass? Or some sort of slight blur that re-jumbles the least significant bits of every pixel?
Scaling the image down seems like one of the best tricks if you can get away with it. Another cheap one would be shifting the image 4 pixels over to break up the DCT artifact grid.
With a good forgery it will be. Even then, the fact that it's noise means that you won't ever be sure about this.