I haven't watched the film yet but plan to. I listened to two podcasts about the story and both were very good. I imagine that they are similar to the film. One is called "exit scam" if you happen to like podcast and want to listen.
The Story of Tong is unfortunate but you have to admit that he made a lot of really bad decisions himself. Spend 10 minutes on any discussion board and you get the echo chamber of "crypto is volatile and risky never invest more than you are willing to lose," "never trust exchanges," "never send all of your crypto to an exchange at one time, always start by sending a little bit at first," ...etc and so on. Its very unfortunate but it also sounds a lot like greed got the best of him to me, right from taking out a loan in the begining and then later trying to avoid fees in the end.
You are right, greed is one of our biggest enemies when it comes to money. At least this can serve as a lesson for the rest of us.
I ended up watching it last night. It was quite good even having know the story already. He admitted that it was greed that fuelled his bad decisions so at least he is aware of that. At one point he said that no one wants to get rich slowly, which I think is true in a lot of cases for a lot of people, but it's a mentality that is unrealistic for the majority and one which makes people take bigger and bigger risks. Investing ends up being g more akin to just plain gambling. Ultimately he risked 400 thousand dollars of his entire life savings to save about 6 thousand dollars... max...
That decision doesn't really make any sense.
Still sucks that he got burnt like that though. Unfortunately I'm sure there are hundreds of similar crypto and stock stories out there.