Yes it is quite funny when people get surprised that a get rich scheme isn’t real.

Even those who aren't informed enough to know better than to be taken advantage of?

In general I have a lot of sympathy for scam victims. But not for anybody in cryptocurrencies, not lately. The slightest of due diligence would have turned up the enormous set of concerns. They had every opportunity to know that there were risks; they just chose to ignore them. I would feel worse for somebody who bought magic beans than a person who "invested" in cryptocurrency in the last few years.

Crypto is difficult to use, so if you used it to lose all that money, it's not that you didn't have the ability to know better, it's that you didn't want to know better (because of your greed.)

if you go investing in new unregulated chaotic markets without doing due diligence to at least research what your investing in you are at least somewhat culpable for your own losses. Don't invest in thing you don't understand.

After hearing enough of "have fun staying poor" and "NGMI" from crypto investors it starts to feel like willful ignorance.

play stupid games get a stupid prize.

This is a weak argument. I believe most knew of the potential downside, they just chose to ignore it. And if they have that little understanding of finance, that's what a savings account is for.

They were going to lose their money either way. The funny bit isn't people who were taken advantage of, but that the one taking the advantage actually sees some negative consequences of it.

I can agree with that, the unfortunate bit is that a couple of others (even the one I was replying to before you replied) have responded to my post actually laughing at the victims.

Which victims, the account holders or investors? I think we can all agree that idiot investors like SoftBank and Sequoia Capital deserve a little laughter.

Well, if you're going to roll the dice with an unregulated securities market because you want massive profits, it helps to have a sense of humour about it.

The issue is that culture has developed into idolizing people just for getting rich. So naturally everyone aspires to this. Moreover lots of these people talk about it like its easy with just a little "financial knowledge" while in fact many just got lucky on some high risk bets (and often enough were already well off enough so they did not need to worry about the losses). Therefore people fall for Nigerian Prince schemes or FTX or many other schemes, they are essentially greedy and want to be one of the ones who make it rich without any real contribution. I'm not sure if one needs to feel sorry for the people loosing something, however I definitely think the current culture of idolizing money is toxic.

I've been trying to find an account of anyone who had a large portion of their wealth in FTX and not just some highly speculative investment they could afford to lose. Was anyone actually trusting these people with their life savings?

There are plenty of people who treated FTX as a high savings yield account and just kept it there.

Most don't want to talk about it now since it's embarrassing but look at the trading firms with writes down of 50% or more.

For small timers, they are just under reported like with Luna, there are probably a fair amount of suicides, but govts don't reveal details to avoid emotional group contagion

You should watch the episode of Downton Abbey where Lord Crawley talks about this fellow in America named "Ponzi" who offers these great returns.

Their ‘chief regulatory officer’ Dan Friedberg was previously tied to a massive online poker scandal!

Let's get real here, there was no "due diligence" or anything else that should have been done when you are investing hard-earned money.