the only thing that puts you at risk in engaging in bitcoin is in fact yourself. many people have invested in bitcoin not completely understanding the nature of the digital world currency and the nature of such an investment product. some people get in because they here all the get quick rich success stories and quickly buy but have done no market research, have not asked experts or have not looked at performance history - making this investment very risky for them.
This also explains why a lot of people have been a victim of an HYIP and cloud mining in the past. They see other people enjoying their cash outs and profits from investing and so they invest as well. They see people making money from it so they're like "Oh this might be actually be legit." And of course they get talked about it by people who are looking for people to sign up under them. They sugarcoat the whole thing and not say that the money from the people are the ones that they use to pay out the old members (the nature of a ponzi).
If an individual did try to do understand the nature of it, then they will ask the question "What would happen if there is not enough new members to pay the old members?" Sadly it's the same thing with those huge networking scams. The only difference is that they have products to sell which kinda blurs out their ponzi-ness. But what can we actually say, people are lazy and they are willing to take advantage of another person's gullibility just to make money.
In bitcoin, though, there's none of this. The only thing that people don't understand that causes them to lose money is that bitcoin isn't a surefire way to make money in x amount of days. It's something that has to grow in order for us to make money from it. Sure there are some who were able to actually become rich from it but those are the ones lucky enough to buy bitcoin in its early stages. People don't understand that they have to hold longer than they thought and so they get impatient and sell their coins at a price lower than they bought it.