There's this unfortunate mixing up of the technology, the community, and the bad actors within the community. Ultimately, more crime gets committed with USD than with cryptocurrencies, yet we don't blame the dollars for those crime the way we blame crypto.
There's a bigger paradigm here that I believe few people understand and that I will desperate attempt to explain. I may be about to write a word salad, but here's hoping.
When the Internet was young, before e-commerce was a thing, it was a delightful space where you could publicly post your e-mail address and never worry about the repercussions. If you ran a server and a hacker gained access, it was on you to improve your security.
Eventually, commerce found the Internet and everything changed. Once money was involved, bad actors started to get involved. This is when we started to experience the delights of e-mail spam, a problem we never really fully solved. And something changed about how we handle those hackers. Now that money is involved, if a hacker gains access to your system, instead of being responsible for your own server you can just call the police. And wow, did they crack down on hackers in the early days. They were bad at catching them, but when they did the punishments were disproportionate. It made things safe enough for commerce to grow, but it didn't make us nor the Internet much "better" in the long run. Rather, it put us in a rut.
Compare that with introduction of Bitcoin - which was money from the moment it was created. Because Bitcoin was about money since the beginning, it also attracted those bad actors from the beginning. However, the Bitcoin paradigm is different. Instead of being connected to the existing financial system, it's a self-contained Internet-native system where the responsibility of security is put (to some degree) in the user's hands. But we users are a bit lazy, especially after being hand-fed dumbed-down UX for decades. That makes us vulnerable because we trust instead of verify. But Bitcoin teaches us to learn, to understand, and hopefully to be more responsible.
I believe that Bitcoin and it's derivative technologies have created something akin to a bug zapper. It attracts bad actors like nothing ever has before. And the only viable retort is to improve technology and educate - the opposite of the traditional system where we give the state a monopoly on violence and then ask them to fix it for us.
If you look over the history of cryptocurrency, you'll see a history of rising and falling value and popularity tied to hacks, exploits, crimes, scams, etc. Often, the news declares the end of the entire enterprise. Yet, each time, the scene not only comes back - it comes back stronger.
What I see is greed and wealth attempting to exploit Bitcoin the way the traditional system gets exploited - but always failing in the long run. And with each failure, the wealth in play gets absorbed into Bitcoin. Meanwhile, we continue to harden and improve Bitcoin and the ecosystem around it. In my mind, it's like a worm that is slowly eating the world's wealth through an ongoing interaction with bad actors. I do not believe it can nor should be stopped.
So this idea that crypto is inherently a scam is the result of scammers being drawn to crypto. It's easy for the public to believe this. But Bitcoin and things like it are, in my opinion, the medicine we need to move through this and on to something else.