From neighborhood homeowners to professional football players, no one gets a free pass from the grifting scum who live to take advantage of others. Until the happy day arrives when these creeps receive a one-time appointment with a greased and sharpened guillotine blade, people must rely on themselves to thwart these scamsters.

(For those of you horrified at the prospect of beheading career criminals, pretend it’s a rubber blade that’ll bounce on impact and give onlookers a hearty chuckle. Everyone else, feel free to suggest which content network should host the streaming vids of the punishment being meted out.)

To help people recognize when someone besides the oil companies and the taxman may be robbing them of hard-earned wages, a new video series on MSN Money offers help. Hosted by the PBS MoneyTrack duo of investing pro Pam Krueger and TV personality Jack Gallagher, the ‘Scam Alert’ series already has a few videos available for viewing.

Chris Jolley, group manager of the Financial Products Group at Microsoft, called the addition of ‘Scam Alert’ a further expansion of a growing collection of high-quality multimedia for MSN Money. “Pam and Jack have years of experience helping millions of people become more aware of their finances, and we are thrilled to bring them on board,” Jolley said in a statement.

MSN Money has quietly grown into a solid property for Microsoft’s web endeavors. We talked with Jolley in December 2007 about MSN Money’s aims for multimedia and other topics; find that discussion on WebProNews.