[Animats]

> it's that crypto makes them much worse by ignoring hard-earned lessons in traditional finance.

Indeed. A friend of mine manages a retail bank branch for a major US bank. She gets a few cases a week where someone appears to be a scam victim or is being coerced in some way. They want to make an unusually big cash withdrawal for their account history, or do an unusual money transfer, or something involving gift cards. She's seen all the standard scams by now, and is experienced in explaining what's going on to the victims. Often she can talk them down, or help them. Sometimes even get previously scammed money back.

A surprisingly large part of retail finance work is dealing with fraud and fixing problems. The routine transactions have been automated for years, after all. Crypto land lacks this.

Here's a bank's guide to current scams.[1]

[1] https://www.firstcitizens.com/personal/insights/security/top...