I probably wasn't clear — of all the people I was farming on behalf of, no one actually lost money. They didn't make any profit, but they didn't lose anything either.
The way the agreement was made between myself and them was that I would not charge for filling their drives with K32 plots and in return I would get 5% of monthly rewards by farming their plots. I would handle the entire farming operation and pay for electricity/internet the entire time. The duration of this agreement was for 'lifetime' or for as long K32 plots were accepted for farming.
They could opt out at any time by me purchasing their drives at the original cost price after subtracting what they earned through farming. For example, someone bought 16x4tb for 100k and they had cashed out about 58k by December, so I paid them the remainder 42k for those 16 drives. Admittedly, It worked out well for me but at the same time they didn't lose their initial investment. They just never made the high profits that they were expecting.
For the forum members who did pay Rs 75 per plot, one is now banned and the others, as far as I can tell, sold their drives above their purchase price. There's a gaming cafe in Gujarat that sent me 20x5tb portable drives, I don't know if they're still farming but they did purchase those drives without GST. There's a person in Thailand who purchased plots at $3 per plot, but I made it clear that $2 of that went to to bandwidth costs since he wanted to be able to download them.
I would never advocate for anyone to actually purchase crypto and I have crypto transactions dating back to 2013. Even when BTC fell to $200, I couldn't bring myself to buy any. But earning/mining/farming crypto is viable, so long as long as you temper expectations and spend wisely. My GPU mining setup in 2013 consisted of sub $150 graphics cards (Radeon HD6950's) on budget FM2 boards when everyone was splurging on $300 HD7970 cards with risers and multiple power supplies. That was easily the most profitable venture I've undertaken.
With Chia, you still have your drives and if you bought them a year ago, they're worth more today than what you paid for them.