In most cases the money can’t be recovered because it gets quickly wired to countries like Nigeria or HK. It’s a whole industry. Completely opaque because no company likes to talk about the losses. These things are handled quietly.
On a different level: I believe many structured products purchased by private consumers are at least a rip-off and could be categorized as scam. Take for example life insurances sold by brokers with lifetime contracts yielding almost no interest whatsoever. There is a constant battle between regulators, lawyers and companies.
Which has unquestionably benefited consumers.
If you look at the financial system 50 years ago and compare it to today consumers have far more rights and protections. And the system continues to learn and improve e.g. requiring banks to hold more reserve capital and increasing the amount of deposit insurance.
Problem for Web3 is that governments, regulators and the legal system do not play a central role like in Web2. And so all of the safety nets built up over these years will evaporate and consumers will suffer.
Whoever's going to push web3 will still want that opacity, it's a feature, not a bug. They'll want it to make money and to protect and hide their money.
Plus you can't have it both ways, either cryptocurrencies are somehow, magically, privacy protecting and anonymous, or you have transparency. It's impossible to have both.
Realistically, the buyers of bored apes are not really of interest to anyone and the NFTs probably won't be worth anything in the future.
When crypto is used to purchase things that actually matter then it will most likely be a trivial matter to identify whether the coins are "tainted".
But I work for a bank and our money laundering systems and processes automatically kick in for suspicious transactions and those over a certain amount. We will freeze transactions until we conduct due diligence aiming to identity the true parties e.g by unsheathing shell companies as well as the nature and intent of the transaction.
And this is through a range of methods including requesting supplemental documentation and involving law enforcement.
Can you clarify for any of the million dollar Bored Ape Yacht Club purchases who the true parties are given that supposedly this information can be derived from the blockchain ?