As I understand, scammers are as old as time itself. Years ago the government put in place certain “investor protection” laws that make it harder to scam people. A lot of this has to do with honest disclosure of how the “investment” works and ensures that customer/investor funds aren’t treated carelessly.

Some of these investments are called securities and are considered so if they pass the Howey Test - if there is an "investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others."

It seems like the majority of crypto tokens were scams or poorly executed to ride the hype wave, and the rest were actually unregistered securities pretending to be new tech and competes with Bitcoin itself. A core team of developers worked on a private network whose goal was to return profits for early investors. That’s not illegal, but there are things you MUST disclose to your investors in order to prevent such abhorrent fraud as we’ve seen so much of à la FTX, et al.