If anything has changed much recently, it's that grifters have taken control of the entire system of government and economic activity - they're no longer just a pack of con artists preying on riverboat travellers, but have infiltrated all the branches of government and business and academia in the USA.
Today's most successful grifters are not isolated criminals like SBF, but rather the leading politicians and media talking heads and government bureaucrats and corporate executives who sit at the top of the American Empire - it's a nice example of the systemic institutional corruption seen at the ends of previous Empires, from the Roman to the Byzantine to the French, British and Soviet collapses, and appears to be heading towards the same conclusion.