Money laundering is a different kind of a problem from what we're talking about here, though. Those are mostly KYC or internal controls failures - I'm not saying they're a good thing but they're not impacting other customers of the bank really.

Find some recent example of the owners of a bank/exchange absconding with their client funds: that would be closer to the matter at hand.

Last example of a bank failure where ordinary people lost a lot of money I’d say was the failure of Lehman Brothers. Lots of risk averse retail investors were sold Lehman certificates with somewhat better yields (“mini-bonds”) because Lehman paid high commissions to the retail banks, eg in Germany and Hong Kong.

Wirecard :)

But you’re right. Mostly the normal banks and exchanges are regulated and incidence of fraud is low. A lot of that regulation is “lessons from past failures”, which crypto hasn’t had yet.

Wirecard wasn't a bank/exchange either. But a payment processor. It was fraudulent though.

Did any customers actually lose money over the Wirecard thing, or was it just the shareholders and lenders that lost out? I couldn't immediately find anything about customer losses.

As far as I know, they weren't any customer losses.