1) Don't just trust the status of a member, anyone can be a hero member. This just means that he invested some time on his membership. He can always decide that a profitable scam will be a good payment for his time. However, a Hero account without negative feedback can be sold for more than 0.5 btcs. Therefore, he probably won't scam you for less than that, because a negative feedback from you would lower its value substantially.
Here is a list of escrow members:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=108716.0Hi,
This is an interesting paragraph. Is there any thread about this topic somewhere?
On the other hand, each one starts. So it probably is not the best idea to manage only the rank of a given member