Many of them who are going to get scammed with this horrible attempt are going to be pretty mature in terms of age.
I guess that depends on what age range you consider "mature". I seriously doubt these shithead DeFi scammers (formerly shithead ICO/IEO scammers) are going after the elderly, unless they're cold-calling people trying to solicit investment money--which I'm pretty sure they're not. I think TalkStar meant immature in the sense of not being experienced with cryptocurrency, regardless of actual age.
Whatever the case may be, you are correct about this:
1. Copying whitepaper is a sure shot indicator of a scam,
2. Mining is no longer profitable for even big mining farms with the drop in block subsidy after this year's halving comparing the rising difficulty.
But the "immature" targets of these scammers aren't likely to read whitepapers or know much about mining, which is why these plagiarized whitepapers and other sketchy new projects need to be exposed (on this forum at least) and let's just hope potential investors find the red flags before sinking money into any of this crap. And there will be more of it. Lots more.
So always everywhere is DeFi? It does not matter in a good place or in a bad place.
Yeah, and I find that to be quite unfortunate because it seems like there's some potential for good things to happen with DeFi, as opposed to ICOs which were nothing but crap across the board. If people aren't able to tell the difference between a scam and a legitimate project because of all the scam attempts, it's the legit projects that are going to take a beating that they're not entitled to.