Have/Are coding bootcamps taking advantage of people's need for instant gratification?

I feel like the bootcamp marketing has shifted and is more like a creepy run down gas station in the middle of nowhere in a horror movie, where the people stop because they ran out of gas but the place looks abandoned 20 years ago and the price caps out at $0.99 because there is only two numbers on the sign available, and then some sketchy person greets you a HUGE SMILE, welcoming you on in, and then you get kidnapped and tortured.

I don't think so intentionally. Maybe I'm naive, but the bootcamps I know the founders do really care and want to do good. It's more of a symptom of the psychology of the founders. I have been doing a 4 year study of Codesmith and it exemplifies this. Like Codesmith for example, the founder went from NOTHING to $25M a year. He was allegedly (according to court documents) making $500K a year + up to 50% of profits. Like that kind of overnight success could go to someone's head. Codesmith's founder hired a ton of people on Upwork to support him and they all just back up this vision of a genius who made $25M out of nothing. And that's a big accomplishment right! But in reality Codesmith was benefiting from the founder's natural teaching ability and a popular Frontend Masters course + and the very hot job market for SWEs. Many materials were allegedly copy-paste, the instructors just graduated and allegedly rubber stamped assignments, the open source projects full of leaked credentials and holes, mismanagement of credentials lost access to their email and website for 3 weeks last year, but the market was so hot, it went to their heads and all these problems were minor compared to the undeniable money flowing in. Then when the market died my opinion is they just couldn't accept reality. Continuing to tell people in 2025 "you can be next!" in their marketing. Continuing to tell people in calls that 'the market is improving', etc... I don't think it was preying on the desperate at all. I think it's delusion. Backtracking a bit, the founder has sold 75% of the company very early on, fought to get back control of the company over the years, claimed in legal documents that there were unauthorized withdrawals from their bank, and other investor litigation about the ownership. Now it appears from GitHub to be a handful of students remaining and they are pivoting to government contracts and enterprise offerings. It's a tremendous story of grit and perseverance resulting in tragedy in my opinion. I think it's a sad story of a founder who didn't learn his lesson in all of this and still blames everyone else for his problems. The number one rule is to double down on criticalness when things are there best, instead of doubling down on ego. I wanted to help and got my arm chewed off instead.