Sam Bankman-Fried is everybody's villain and right now and has many people running from crypto.  I just thought I would add a little perspective to what he has done and help you realize it is small time compared to what players on Wall Street have done.  And the few I have posted here are just some of the more recent guys. In the early days, it was nothing for people to run up the prices of mining companies with news of a mine hitting it big in Western United States, mines that might not have put one shovel in ground. In those days, it could take weeks or months to figure out it was a scam.

Michael De Guzman

He was the man many believe was the perpetrator of the famous BreX debacle. Bre-X is a Canadian company, but De Guzman was Filipino. De Guzman was the chief geologist for Bre-X, and he had access to core samples retrieved from a mine in Indonesia. When the gold deposit numbers came in a little below average, De Guzman helped contribute to the biggest mining fraud in modern history by faking the samples to indicate a massive gold find. As time went on, the estimates were increased to as much as 200 million ounces. To get a handle on this number, the U.S. Treasury Department has about 250 million ounces of gold in its reserves.

This fraud was accomplished by inserting gold into the samples to make it look like there was much more gold in the Indonesian mine than there really was. As a result, the 30-cent penny stock quickly climbed to as high as $250.  However, independent geologists were suspicious of the mine's supposed riches, and the Indonesian government started moving in. De Guzman eventually jumped to his death from a helicopter. Bre-X stock plummeted, costing its investors $3 billion.

Richard Whitney

He was the president of the NYSE from 1930 to 1935. On October 24, 1929, acting as an agent for a pool of bankers, he bought shares in many companies, creating a dramatic turnaround in the market. This caused him to be falsely hailed as a hero to the market, but the inflated stocks inevitably crashed five days later. To cover his losses, he would borrow money from friends, relatives, and business acquaintances. This allowed him to buy even more stock in a market that was collapsing, which made his problems even worse.

Despite his losses, he continued to live a lavish lifestyle. When he could no longer borrow any more money, he began to embezzle it from his customers as well as from an organization that helped widows and orphans. His fraud became more perverse when he looted the NYSE's Gratuity Fund, which was supposed to pay $20,000 to each member's estate upon death.

Bernard Ebbers  

Known as "Bernie", he was the CEO of a long-distance telecommunications company called WorldCom. In less than two decades, he took the company to a position of dominance in the telecommunications industry, but shortly thereafter, in 2002, the company filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Under Ebbers' leadership, the company made 70 acquisitions, the largest of which was MCI in 1997.All of these acquisitions created problems for the company because it was difficult to integrate the old company with each new one. The acquisitions also threw massive amounts of debt on the company's balance sheet. To keep earnings growing, the company would write off millions of dollars in losses it acquired in the current quarter and then move smaller losses going forward to create the perception that the company was making more money than it really was. This gave WorldCom the ability to take small charges against its earnings every year and spread the large losses over the decades.

This scheme worked until the U.S. Justice Department denied the company's acquisition of Sprint in 2000, fearing that the combined companies would dominate the nation's telecommunications industry. This forced WorldCom to make the previous mergers work for them and meant that it would only be a matter of time before all the losses that they were taking from other acquisitions would affect the company's growth.

When WorldCom filed for bankruptcy, it admitted that it inappropriately booked the losses from its acquisitions from 1999 to 2002. Ebbers also took personal loans from the company. He resigned as CEO in April 2002 and was later convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and filing false documents with the SEC. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

So...

Just keep in mind that there are many bad actors, many of whom we have yet to find out about, that will take advantage of new and emerging technology.  Usually these guys prey on greed, so act accordingly.