"falling for a cryptocurrency scam that he believed would make him wildly rich"

Greed is a powerful force

Indeed, yet these scam gangs (often whole office buildings filled) are popping up like weeds, and there's nothing here about trying to catch the scam gang. Is it even illegal, it must be fraud, at least.

When something sounds so outrageous, you have to wonder what the full story is. It can't be as simple as the article suggests.

A bank CEO would have a solid understanding of debt and interest. I suspect he must have seen a legitimate opportunity but he didn't account for the human side of the equation that the crypto would be a rug pull.

Assuming you control a bank to such extent, you could potentially keep up a scheme going forever provided that you leave enough safety margins for interest rate increases.

I bet there are people running such schemes and getting away with them as we speak.

For example, you can loan money to someone you trust to buy crypto assets, if you and your friends hold most of the coins, you can achieve essentially any market cap you want... For example, you can spend $1000 a day to buy 1000 coins per day from your friend... You can move those newly purchased tokens back and forth 1000 times between different accounts so that your trading volume hits like $1 million per day. If you have 1 billion coins in circulation, your crypto's market cap is now $1 billion dollar... Becoming a billionaire on paper is easy!

It's basically the same thing that happens with stock markets except that the stock market involves more participants.

If you don't believe that this can work, consider that this is exactly how the banking system at large operates. It keeps borrowing new, increasing amounts of money into existence to pay back the old debts, using the inflating nominal value of collateral to justify the increasing size of the new loans. Literally the only difference is that in that case, it involves many real people moving money in a circle instead of one person moving money in a circle.