I wonder if it is just harder to give away several million dollars of government currency without being able to recover it? This is only an interesting story because it is so much money and because they are able to narrow the suspects down to a small group.
Cryptocurrencies are like speedrunning the discovery of why finance is regulated, though, that is certainly true.
I think you’re saying the same thing from the other side: it’s definitely true that it’s harder to get or transfer large amounts of real money because the system has layers of protection due to past fraud, but those fraud protections also mean that most people can’t get the kind of paper profits which lure people to cryptocurrencies. This gives scammers the appealing target of a self-selected group of financially unsophisticated people who have chosen a system designed to make large scale theft easy and safe.