What does it being a speculative vehicle have to do with FTX stealing the money? These people did not lose money because their speculative investment lost value. On the contrary, it has gone up considerably in the meantime but FTX pocketed all of the gains.
Think about what happened as soon as a grownup entered the room and saw their records? Real financial companies have tons of regulatory and insurance requirements for things like audits, reserves, etc. to prevent things like that from happening but the entire point of his field was “that stuff’s just slowing me down and we don’t need it!” because everyone was focused on getting rich and overrode their judgment.
It’s the next level of risk up from people who buy stocks because the price is going up without checking the fundamentals. If all you do is hang around with other people hyping the same thing, it’s really easy to focus on the “number goes up” part and not want to be the person spoiling the party by asking about value.
