If these supposedly respectable banks managed to repeatedly do this (this is after the financial crisis btw) then it's anyone's guess what goes on in the Wild West that is Bitcoin exchanges. That said, the stupidity and lack of common sense in UK financial industry continues blows my mind.
[0] - https://www.moneymarketing.co.uk/why-the-fca-rewrote-the-rul...
Not to mention the richness of implying chinese exchanges are somehow uniquely bad! Exchange shenanigans on the english speaking web are a central part of the bitcoin story to this point.
There are still people putting money into MMM, which is a long-running scam with its own Wikipedia article.[1]
The binary option industry, run out of Ramat Gan in Israel, was a whole industry of bucket shops pretending to be brokers. It got so big it was 40% of Israel's financial sector. About 95% of binary option investors lose their entire investment. Turns out it's legal in Israel to scam non-Israelis. Once that came out, it became a political embarrassment.[2] “Binary options is causing anti-Semitism around the world.” - a member of the Knesset.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_(Ponzi_scheme_company) [2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/unhappy-with-bill-israels-coal...