This isn't really surprising. Cons are literally "confidence tricks", i.e. betrayals of social trust, which can be disorienting and distressing, even traumatizi

This isn't really surprising. Cons are literally "confidence tricks", i.e. betrayals of social trust, which can be disorienting and distressing, even traumatizing. We know that rape victims, to use an extreme example, often try to normalize what happened to them - especially when the attacker was a close friend or intimate partner. A common story is a victim being sexually abused by a partner in the evening and making their abuser breakfast the next morning because then it can't have been abuse and must have been consensual because why would a victim make breakfast for their abuser - that'd be absurd. Nobody wants to be a victim. Some people like to play the victim, sure, and some victims (usually after quite a bit of therapy) try to own their victim status to come to terms with what they've experienced but victims are at least as likely if not more to pretend nothing happened (even when they're traumatized and their denial is perpetuating that trauma) as they are to speak up. With cons that are scams there's of course also the chance to play hot potato: you may have been the mark but that only makes you a victim if you are the end of the chain. If you can still con someone else to make your money back, you didn't get fooled, you just got inconvenienced at worst and you're not really at fault for conning the next person because after all you wouldn't have done it if you hadn't been conned to begin with. Crypto, one might argue, might be one such example.