You may have read or heard that some of the sums of money involved are pretty fabulous. The people getting that money are loudly proclaiming that they were duped despite published communications that indicate they knew exactly what they were doing.

Are they trying to protect their reputations? Yeah think about that for a minute. If you read all the way to the end of the indictment there's a section called forfeiture allegations. That means the doj is going after all the money involved in the scheme. That's why people are playing dumb.