Believe me, I wish there were a way to prevent scams entirely, and to refund everyone who had been scammed. However, that's not possible, or even reasonable to expect. The system that SR *does* have in place for the intended transactions (btc for a product) works perfectly as long as you stay in escrow. When these transactions take place to buy BTC from a vendor here, those transactions are always particularly risky since they, by their very nature, cannot take place in the escrow system. It might be one of the reasons we see so many BTC vendors scamming people - because they know that people are going to think they are protected when in fact they are not. So they come here knowing how to scam people out of their MP codes, and take advantage of the fact that transactions to buy BTC aren't covered by SR Support. Such a shame. If it makes you feel any better, I, myself, have been scammed before when attempting to buy btc from a vendor here. It was long ago when I was new, but it was for a large amount too, so I know how frustrating it is. When it first happened, I, too, thought that bitcoin transactions were protected by escrow, but learned the hard way that they are not. When you step back from the situation (somewhere down the line when you have gotten over the initial shock of the loss), I think eventually you'll be able to understand why SR Support can't offer support for those transactions. In any case, my best recommendation would be either to buy btc ONLY from really reputable vendors like Sugar Mama ... or to do the safest thing and purchase your bitcoins elsewhere through an exchange.