when i scam is trying to get me i will report it to the moderators because thats what i do
do reports on game pages go to the page owner as well?
If you talk about the report button on game pages, that would be quite funny, if that report would go to the page owner you are complaining about.
Just click the report button if you stumble upon such scams. You can scroll down really fast or use an incognito browser, depending why you are uncomfortable visiting such pages.
They usually have two accounts. One new and one hacked. One account hosts the game and the other spams. If the hoster gets banned, the spammer then hosts the game. I assume this is because it is difficult to report the spammer. As you have pointed out, the reports go to the game page owners. You cant report users directly to itch with report buttons. there is moderation in between. A reason why these scams often happen around weekend I presume.
Not having a password protected archive, not having exe that require admin rights, being careful about stuff like runtime compressing giving false positives, hosting on itch, etc.
Scammers like to post on hacked accounts, so an established account is no guarantee for trust.
What you ask for is something like a human tested approval badge. With current itch system that is not possible. Reviews are not public in that sense. In theory you could be on public game collections to that effect. But on a game page you can not check, if the game is on such a collection.
Scammers also got more clever by allowing comments, they just delete the comments of people giving warning. And posting comment with, this is legit good game, no viruses, I promise... yeah. That is what a scammer would say ;-)
There is a reason why publishing on steam costs money.
I found one of these scammers trying to pull this on me
https://deadtrigger-pc.itch.io/deadtrigger
the page isn't up yet but maybe you can find them
How do you know you been scammed?
If you believe you were, changing passwords is a good start. But maybe not do that on a system you think is compromised.
Booting up with a secure boot disk or usb stick and scanning for hidden surprises and otherwise scanning your system thoroughly might help too.
I tried three different scanners, and the file you claimed is a scam, was not recognised as such. Of course I will not execute it to check if it silently steals my passwords anyways. If it really is a scam, this is worrssome.