There really aren't a lot of good possibilities here, how did these exchanges get so large before anyone thought of audits?
Who said no one thought of this? There was simply no one to enforce this.
Look at Coinbase. They made a point of being “regulated in the US”. They’re audited. They’re legit (most likely. I’m not the auditor). They’re complying with disclosure laws as a publicly traded company.
Look at Patio11, he’s been publicly making claims about tether and the crypto ecosystem for years. If it all blows up and his speculation /research was right, then who is to blame? We’ll have years of boy crying wolf and we thought it was a sheep.
There are many banks in europe that will not open accounts for people who just moged there, unless they bring along plenty of money.
This simply means that having your coins on an exchange is the same a forfeiting them unless otherwise proven.
But the crypto exchanges double down on that, they speculate like the banks do, but with zero risk managment and oversight, the biggest accounting firms do not want to offer their services to them.
They have also leveled up their exit strategies, instead of the plain old run away, they run the business while they can extract money and then later they seek legal cover under the umbrella of bankruptcy laws.