The joke is that the SEC steps in only after the money is lost. Or their actions cause a stock to tank and everyone loses their money anyway. When the SEC halts trading on a penny stock, when it resumes trading is instantly worthless or close to it, so again people lose money. Basically, the SEC is useless at preventing people from losing money.
Scams will always exist and scammers will always find new ways to scam people, no matter how many warnings there are. Advance fee scammers find are now doing crypto giveaways in which a victim sends 'x' crypto in the promise of '2x 'more. Crypto is the latest iteration of penny stock pump and dump scams.
The SEC kind of steps in as soon as they have reason to investigate, they even have a rather profitable whistleblower program (profitable for the whistleblower who gets between 10 and 30% of every fine above 1 million). The SEC is a civil agency charged with protecting "investors", not defrauded customers. The latter is, to the best of my knowledge, referred to prosecutors by the SEC (I think the southern district of New York).
Scams will always exist and scammers will always find new ways to scam people, no matter how many warnings there are. Advance fee scammers find are now doing crypto giveaways in which a victim sends 'x' crypto in the promise of '2x 'more. Crypto is the latest iteration of penny stock pump and dump scams.