Think about this: Sam was this wunderkind MIT math wiz, who got a job at the highly competitive trading firm Jane Street after college, and his parents were high profile professors at Stanford. So the intellectual belief was there, no one doubted his capacity to think and solve problems.

Add in that he was a vocal proponent of the Effective Altrusim philosophy, more regulation for the crypto industry, and that he simply came off as a friendly, young guy who liked video games, there wasn't much in his public image that hinted he wasnt someone to be trusted.

So that whole persona he built, it seems, made people overlook red flags, and they didn't do as much homework on FTX/SBF as they should have. Big institutions bought into it, media outlets wrote glowing profiles of him -- so everyday retail traders especially really had no reason to not believe Sam. They likely assumed that if the major corporations believed in him, they surely did their due diligence.

-PR