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Frankly, yes there is. However, the same can essentially be said about posting a preprint somewhere online. Some asshole could still rip it off and submit it to a journal. Most likely the reviewers won't have come across your preprint, and if you accuse them of stealing your idea, they'll just claim independently discovering the same thing.
The only way you can really stay air-tight is writing up a proper article and submitting it to a journal. That can be a tough process to get through though, so you may be better off finding someone in the academic world that you are willing to trust.
In most fields, there are some people that float between industry and academia, so you may find someone that a common acquaintance can vouch for.
A possible protection for OP and anyone else reading this could be to upload a draft of a report to a repository at osf.io (Open Science Foundation). You can keep the repository hidden for now, but it'll be there with a date stamp on it should the worst happen and somebody rip off the work
Happy cake day!