If many would have been well informed earlier before now and things could have been more better for them, because the earlier we got informed, the better it is for us to prevent ourselves from any harm now or later.

Make use of a non custodial wallet for your security sake, because doing this will render you access to the required keys to where your asset was kept on the blockchain, exchanges are custodial storage and can't give you the necessary keys to your asset, some newbies don't know about all these until they are affected, we can use an exchange to buy bitcoin, after which we are expected to move them to a non custodial wallet, which we can have control over it.