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I'm not a fan of storing this information either. That's why I am in favor of our current method of "trust" with posting to an existing social media site or blog. However, we do need a dedicated person to do the job and I am hoping after the new site is up in a couple weeks we have one on board already to do it a bit more proactively with a personable approach.

There is no other way to avoid scamming without identity check. What scammers fer the most is others finding out who they are. If there are no social consequences for scamming behaviour, then scamming with flourish.
The option would be to copy all such data to cold storage and keep non of it online.