Particularly in finance, I think a lot of these people convince themselves of an overly cynical view of the world: "They all do this - I'm just playing the game like everybody else."

When risk is involved, there's also often some hubris in the assessment. These crypto orgs obviously never intended to go broke. They probably honestly thought they'd likely have so much money that they'd cover their customer commitments without any issue. And if they did, they frankly probably wouldn't have ended up exposed and in legal trouble.

Which comes back to the first point: people cynically thinking all the orgs who made it big also did all this shady stuff but got away with it.