Are we able to curb such practice, or an educational campaign to discourage such behaviour?
I don't remember offering loans in this forum.
This isn't the first time nor will be the last, I recommend to ignore them and to publish the message in the meta section (maybe a single topic to collect this crap isn't a bad idea) and inform the mods/admins about it.
informing them wont do anything, most of the pms are likely from brand new accounts anyways. just ignore them, put their names in your pm ignore list, whatever.
there isnt much that can be done to prevent them from creating new accounts (vpn, tor, etc). you can report the pm to the admins using the report function that should be on every pm and have their ip banned though, maybe.