Thanks to @chriddi for highlighting this to me...

Scammers have become an inevitable part of Steemit... an incurable disease that we've got to learn to live with.

Whilst we continue to incentivise people for specific actions (e.g. write an introduction post, follow an achievement program, enter a contest) then we are providing scammers with a template for how to succeed.

We can continue to introduce hurdles (e.g. links to other social media, video calls, etc.) which they will navigate in the same way that they have done with validation photographs. These fake accounts are all based around real people - real people who are used to circumvent the "Rules" that have been created. Having spent a lot of time supporting the Greeters in the background, many already undertake a video call and there are certainly instances where despite a video call, they're verified and turn out to be fake accounts.

All the while, the hurdles are such that genuine people, real users won't want to navigate them - as @weisser-rabe discusses in her Representative Report.

Rather than implement more rules (i.e. barriers to genuine users) which the scammers will simply adapt to, we'd be better off if we abolish all of the existing rules and everybody simply votes for good content which shows a bit of personality... We all have our own "rules" for users that we vote for and it's the scammer's prerogative to maximise their rewards based upon the rules of the biggest voters - i.e. the steemcurator accounts. The fact that we openly publicise what these "rules" are, makes their job (and therefore success) infinitely more straightforward.