My friends know I'm the local crypto-geek[0] so Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and tokens are brought up to me all the time by people who's knowledge of what any of it is begins and ends with "Last year X coin was $7.00 and this year it's $100.00, and all of the other ones have had gains like nothing else I can invest in."
I can think of at least 6 members of my extended family who are presently invested in cryptocurrency trading (many just say "Bitcoin" and don't actually have any) who are -- in every way -- technologically obliviously ignorant[1]. Half of them, however, are not otherwise uneducated people (one guy is a very well paid VP at a company everyone in my state has heard of and has an MBA from a major university ... he's just not in finance or tech). They're not thinking "well, 15% APY is insane/impossible to provide over the short term/impossible to ever guarantee unless they've invented a time machine or are breaking the law." They're looking at the percentage gains on Bitcoin or Ethereum (depending on when you acquired it, of course -- Lord knows it's taken a hit lately) and thinking "15% sounds easy for a company to pull off in this space."
Everyone in my family who invested in some crypto used some company to hold their crypto. Almost all of them used services/companies that had enough of a strong scent of "scam" that I would have dismissed them without further research. Some used more mainstream crypto-sort-of-banks. Sort-of-banks because none of the companies that my family members chose for crypto trading were FDIC or otherwise insured in a manner that made sure the numbers they see on their page could be turned into dollars in a bank account somewhere else. The surprising thing is that none of them had any idea this was the case! A few family members thought they were buying Bitcoin because they were investing in "cryptocurrency" and it turned out they were buying some strange token running on the Ethereum network.
I'll grant it's a small sample size, but in every way it's consistent ... it's a "gold rush" kind of frenzy filled, unfortunately, with a lot of fraudsters riding the wave of news around the crazy gains of crypto.
The thing that scares me the most is that a few of my family members[2] have done very well trading crypto (4x/5x/10x their yearly salary). Some lost a little, the others gained a little. The ones that did well aren't treating it like a short-term gamble, even watching the prices drop ... it's like they're holding on to the stock of a company that they deeply believe in except ... there's no company.
[0] I don't invest, I did mine Ethereum a while back/spent most of it and made a small profit but did it mostly to learn how the miner worked and how to write CUDA software. I worked SecDev for a couple of years at a global telecom and I enjoy the technology behind it all.
[1] One of them -- not elderly -- called for help reconnecting to his 4G modem (their only internet service). The instruction "reboot your computer" was not understood. I fell back to "turn it off, count to ten, turn it on again." Nope, right back where he left it. I had not seen his computer setup so I could provide no more instruction. When I arrived I discovered he was "rebooting" ... the monitor.
[2] Four, precisely, two who are distantly related through a great aunt and are working together, but are among the most irresponsible people with money I've ever known, and two who are quite good with most things financial.
Edit: Realized my tone was harsh in a few places and there was one inaccuracy.