It's literally why we have government. You let people rip each other off, pretty soon the guns come out. That was America from the immediate post-colonial era right through the late 1800s. That is also Baltimore City today, as regarding its third or fourth-largest industry.
A poorly- or under-regulated industry creates room for both the monopolist and the tort bar. If you don't quash fraud (and monopoly/monopsony) via civil and criminal cases directly, plaintiffs will be assembled for class actions. All this cause-effect used to be pretty well understood in a pretty bi-partisan way. Before I was born.
Since then, it's been a race to deregulate and defang would-be regulators of broad swaths of commerce while simultaneously over-regulating small and medium-sized business about matters that often don't matter much. By now you can have a successful lawsuit based on a paper, or technical, violation of the law without any underlying ill intent, while failing utterly to hold account those for whom mean fraud is the whole business model. We're so broken it's hard to know where to even start.
Example: At the very start of my journalism career I did a series of stories about a young dude, Mark Shapiro, who used investors' cash and minority business loans (he had a hispanic guy as a front) to buy mid-sized apartment complexes. Managed with any kind of care, it could have been a decent long-term business, but this guy's play was to milk them. He'd pocket the rents, do no repairs or maintenance, and also stiff his investors and the banks. Classic way to live like a king with no work required.
This was in the early 1990s. My boss had written about the same guy a few year's prior. Same scam, smaller scale. He'd declared bankruptcy and walked away, then started up again. This time he was doing federal mortgage fraud on a pretty grand scale (a few 10s of millions, anyway). I figured he was toast.
Nothing happened to him. He actually got me arrested for trespassing in one of his complexes.
Decades later, the feds finally put a case on him. By this time, he was selling shares in buildings he didn't even own. After 30 years living like a multi-millionaire, purely via fraud, he was sentenced to 85 years.
He's now free; Trump pardoned him last month along with his partner. "A White House news release praised the men as “model prisoners,” who had earned support and praise from other inmates."
What are the odds this guy is even now back doing exactly what he does? Why wouldn't he?