I would simply have not given real money to some company in the Bahamas in exchange for a token and a promise the token would be good for more money later. But I’m street smart like that.
I remember finding them in a list where they offered something like 8% interest if you deposited your bitcoins with them which was still fishy as hell. It looked like a sweet deal but I wondered how they managed to do that sustainably. I guess the answer was "they didn't".
I think you're thinking about Celsius. SBF absolutely had his own coin, and it is tantamount to the whole FTX collapse. Their competitor owned a shit load of it, it was called FTT iirc. He then just decided to tweet out that they were selling all their FTT, and then everyone started selling FTT which started a run on the token.
The company also pumped FTT and other tokens value through their hedge fund Alameda research. The man deserves every last day of sentencing.
Also, be glad you didn't put money in Celsius. I have a friend that did for the interest that they were offering. It worked... Til it didn't. He lost $50k.
People absolutely think something about it when it happens, and hell sometimes the government even does something about it (as demonstrated in the article you linked). Just a whole lot of us would argue they don't do enough about it.
I'm not actually defending Sam Bankman-Fried. I'm pointing out the obvious hypocrisy in the system. Both that fat fuck and actual bank execs need to waste away in prison cells.