But alas, the mainstream is busy buying into Bitconnect, Onecoin, Potcoin, PonziCoin (yes, that was a real coin and people lost money when the operator - you won't believe this now - exit scammed them and ran off with the money). And trades them on FTX.
How do you solve this problem? Checks and balances and strong institutions that actively work to remove moral hazards from society AND themselves. Sure, if you weaken institutions and then claim they’re ineffective, you’re just creating self-fulfilling prophecies. In a well-designed system, you don’t need to audit the auditors. Make sure that the auditors are secret and that randomly chosen (ie there’s no incentive to collude with the entity being audited). Provide strong incentives (training, compensatory, social, rewards) and protection (ie people with power going after them / their reputation) for both rooting out corruption/scams and that when they say a business isn’t a scam then it’s most likely not (eg clawbacks on money, prestige, recognition, etc).
Additionally, the FBI, IRS and other state and federal law enforcement agencies should be proactively auditing the largest businesses OR outsourcing to very trusted auditors (ie ones for whom the cancellation of the contract would be a death sentence which is easy to enforce by requiring that 100% of revenue for the outsourced agency comes from the federal government and there’s N such agencies that all split the pie so that if one fails and gets corrupt the others take over (the FBI is authorized to have wiretaps and secretly monitor the auditors to ensure there’s no kind of collusion communication happening between auditing agencies (ie we allow leadership in these trusted position to require that you give up more of your rights to be in it and we publish job-relevant details from ~5 years ago without any FOIA battles allowed - only personal details can be omitted and only on-the job details are revealed so no marital secrets). Additionally, anyone caught leaking or losing these records before they are released to the public is punished by getting fired and criminal charges being mandatory. If an audit of the FBI reveals the director is asleep / didn’t properly establish best practices to keep the data in control, the president fires them.
Anyway these are all obvious wildly radical ideas and not necessarily possible to implement due to various laws / there may be flaws in the specific details. My overall point still stands. It’s fraud because we let it exist, not because it’s impossible due to human nature / the way society works.
It was in reply to the above comment saying our entire society is run on scams, which is true. We can start cleaning it up from the top, which is the smart way to go about it instead of tilting at legal windmills. In the current system, you're more likely to get caught and punished as a petty criminal than someone who siphons off millions. Yes, some fraud will always be possible in free societies but it doesn't have to be the way it currently works. More transparency and better record keeping are a positive thing. Even if we take your example of someone inputting wrong data, they're more likely to be found than if there is no data at all and thus nothing to scrutinize. People who falsify data make mistakes just like anyone does.