Are there industries outside of crypto with a larger gap between the cluster of most cutting edge novel technical work and bottom of the barrel scamminess?

I think advertising, finance, law, construction, and other industries have extremes of scamminess / criminality (esp. when scope is global)

Construction is a good one! Not convinced the best of advertising beats crypto, and finance/law in the past few decades has been “reigned in” significantly

ah I was thinking broadly in time/space. 

time = advertising has been at the "frontier" before (culturally and technically)
space = lots of fraud in law & low ends of finance globally (esp. in places with weak rule of law, not-democracies)

I see! Yeah, it was hard to phrase the original cast but this is a good point. I think crypto may have the largest concurrent spectrum 😄