>>from-n+Xf
It's not exactly the kind of grift the article is talking about, but grift is very common in the poorest countries where "free" money and low interest rates were never a thing because there's few other opportunities. Far from removing grift, I'd expect an economic crash to dramatically increase the amount of grift as everyone tries to extract whatever dollars they can.
That also points to the uniting factor between the grift the article talks about and the traditional definition of the word: grifts are the strategies you use when other avenues of making money are difficult, say because your investors are demanding increasing returns from a saturated market.