Mixers and promoters of those services aren’t scammers because of the clients they attract, they are scammers because they convince users that giving up control of their coins is necessary in order to attain privacy. Those who recommended custodial mixers as a privacy solution exposed countless people to the risk of theft through exit scams and selective stealing, not to mention having their information logged and handed over to authorities.
How is that business model different from coordinators, especially when you have services like WasabiCoordinator which were able to find ways to "steal" user funds by using excessive rounds as well?
The reality is, when you use
any privacy service that anonymizes coins, you have to trust that they won't find an exploit in the protocol to drain all of the money. The only case where you don't need to trust is when the privacy is baked into the protocol like in Monero.