In addition to the high cost of trusting the wrong person, it's important to remember that the converse is also true. Being trustworthy is in itself a valuable comoddity in EVE and having a long and proven track record of trustworthy public dealings opens up a lot of doors for players. Chribba, for example, is widely trusted in the EVE community and runs his "third party" escrow service for big trades and business deals.

Due to trustworthy names behind them, entites like EBank are able to succeed despite a few high profile bank scams in the past. I myself have been able to run two massive public investment schemes worth a total of 60 billion isk which sold out extremely quickly. I've since closed them down but it's nice to know that if I ever wanted to start them up again, people would be more than happy to trust me with their isk.