One thing that seems to connect some of these are how they play to being outsiders and for people who otherwise can't get in. The best place to set up a fintech company in Europe is obviously London and if you wanna start up in Munich there's a lot of car industry around to service. But for (fintech) fraud Munich is pretty good, partially because there's less employee overlap with legitimate business for you and the regulators are not really set up to catch you (the way they would be in London). The investors in Theranos were also largely people on the sidelines of VC and the Madoff investors were people who would have a hard time getting into legitimate hedge funds
London is a pretty notorious money laundering hotspot. One of the tensions between the EU and the UK was that the EU wanted better scrutiny and regulation of British tax havens which the dirty money sector in London is not keen on.
Really good point. I remember from Carreyrou's book how big name biotech VCs were notably absent from the list of Theranos investors. People who were capable of making good decisions did just that
