This is pretty simple.

In a transaction involving real money, the items/tc must be sent before the cash. Why? In the event of a scam, the items/tc can be sent back by toribash staff, but money cannot.

This is a great idea but here are some problems with it being a rule. I don't want to sound like I'm shooting down your idea but these are the ones that come to mind for me:
1. This shouldn't need to be a rule since it should really just come under common sense. This is something that people should just be doing because it's clearly the best way to do it.
2. If it's a rule then that implies that it should be enforced with some sort of castigating for not complying with it. How do we enforce and punish it? On the other hand if we don't punish it then there's no point in it being a rule - it's just a guideline then which is what it already is.
3. Users who get scammed already are the types of users who would just keep getting scammed even if this was implemented. It's certainly not in the scammer's best interest to follow this or any other trading safety steps, so the responsibility of the user's trading safety is in the hands of the user as is normal. The problem is that the users that get scammed already don't bother to adhere to our tips and guidelines as it is and likely wouldn't start doing it even if these guidelines were established as rules.

If I could open up a setting file for the community behavior and set SendTbAssets_Before_Paypal = True then believe me, I would. It would save a whole lot of time and effort for everyone but unfortunately this is a community where people are self deterministic. There's only so much we can do where, beyond that, anything extra is just like pissing against the wind - an effort in futility. Those are my quick thoughts but I wouldn't mind hearing other views and ideas. User trading safety and scam reduction is, naturally given my current position, something that I'm very interested in so I'd love to hear any ideas and input as long as it doesn't involvethe development of new forum features (we've already got stuff in the backlog but the pipes are damn small).

Yea I have to agree with Solax on this one, there really isn't much to do with this currently as a rule. The only way to make it safer through the game itself would be to code a new feature into the safe trade system that allows you to put your paypal money on there as a pending transaction waiting for confirmation to send instead of just TC or items. Wether or not the developers would want to do that is another question. The only problem I see with doing it like that though is that Toribash would probably add on a transaction fee to using your paypal through safe trade, which is fair since you're using their security to prevents scams, though the added transaction fee might scare people away from using it.

Two more possibilities I that just came to mind. Toribash is a steam game, would there be any way to make it where you could offer funds from your steam wallet through safe trade?
If you don't want to do that then try this nest idea instead. Update the items you own in toribash to appear as items in your steam inventory, then transactions
through the steam trading system could also become possible for a safe way to trade your stuff. Though this isn't really paypal like you were originally talking about.

this is kinda a little unrelated but i think there should be a permanent disclaimer on the page where you send toricredits about the dangers of buying or selling tc
kinda like steam