> exists for a reason

The reason is that people keep making the same mistake, because people are not very good at assessing high-risk, high-reward projects.

Only a real deadline/delivery failure can wake people up, and only if they haven't pivoted their dream to something else, and only if you don't have other people knowing it's a scam, but willing to prop up the stock price because they are highly invested.

Scams, like cancer, are real; they survive, grow and defend themselves using the same mechanisms (laws, advisors, promotors) as ordinary investments/tissue, until they kill the patient -- so the best scams target the largest unkillable patients and enlist the broadest and deepest range of self-interested insiders as their defense.

It's beautiful, if you really think about it, as a tragic example of the worst of capitalism.