I see people relating crypto scams to newbies only but the honest truth is that scammers feed on people's ignorance, not only that but greed as well, therefore anyone can be a victim, not only newbie. Well, newbies are their easiest targets cause their ignorance makes them very vulnerable but their are some newbies that are very smart and careful online not to lose money to scammers.
Although some can easily be fooled online. For instance, someone was scammed through releasing his passphrase, the scammer told him that he'll be gifted free coins but he'll have to drop his passpharse and out of ignorance he released it to the scammers and the rest of his coin in his wallet was history you'll be suprised how easily such person got scammed but think about it greed could play a role to that.
Maybe the free money he was offered was very huge that he couldn't decline, maybe he might be ignorant but their are people even those with better understanding of the implications of releasing their passphrase that would overlook the implications and release their phrase to the scammer out of greed, everyone just needs to be more careful and avoid being greedy cause many have been scammed due to greed both ignorant and experienced crypto enthusiast.
Even though ignorance is also among the factors of being scammed by greediness, the first factor is because everyone has that greed in them, and you can’t change the fact. Let’s use your example as a case study, but you said passphrase. I don’t know how the scammer was able to scam the victim with only the passphrase, or maybe he had his seed phrase. We don’t know, but one fact is that the victim was also greedy because after having his own hard-earned money in his wallet, he still wanted a free token as a gift. That is the point of greediness.
So the truth is that everyone can be scammed, no doubt, but still it’s not everything that needs to be trusted online, and we all have to reduce our greed to not be victims of scams. Most importantly, you have to be smart in order to escape from those people because they are very wise.