What kind of deterrent would you suggest? What do you think will stop predators like this?
You make an excellent point in your entire post: nothing will completely stop scammers 100%. But I think that the amount of scammers can be cut down considerably, or at least a good amount in relation to the little effort it would take.
I believe the same thing you do: a lot of our scammers can/will/do simply create new accounts and try again. Changing the newbie restrictions a bit would take very little effort and would make the process of getting a scam out there more difficult. It won't stop scams, but I think it would help prevent them. Scammers would likely have to go for bigger scams to make the reward worth the effort, and bigger scams would probably have fewer takers.
If it works? Less scams for a change that could probably be done in a handful of minutes, which means less work for theymos.
If it doesn't work? It still slows down the scams even if it doesn't reduce the total amount, which would also mean less (frequent) work for theymos.
Yeah, I've been thinking about that lately. I've been getting really sick of dealing with scammer cases. It probably takes up a third of my admin time, and despite being nearly useless, it's always controversial.
To me it's less about "more scammer tags" and more about deterring the scammers. You (understandably) don't have the time to monitor every single scam topic, so the goal should be reducing the amount or frequency of the scams that cause them.