We need to stop calling these a "scam" and rather just point out the bad business plan. There are true scams and no one is listening when we point out bad business and pump and dump fake coin forks as the same thing.
BANCOR IS NOT A SCAM.
However, they would have to be VERY successful for you to make your money back given the ICO size.
They have a neat tech and the fundamentals of increasing liquidity through their token process is all good. The bad side? I just don't see how they will ever be popular enough to make back the money raised for the investors. The pump of ETH has really set everything down stream into a hype frenzy.
We wouldn't care about 400k ETH being raised if ETH was at a mature value. But currently, there is a good market high and a 30%+ correction will come, wiping that fiat value out of BANCOR with it.
I would say Bancor already IS very successful, considering the amount of value they acquired. There is just no reason why this would translate to a high value of BNT. The ICO size has nothing to do with this. Even if only 10ETH had been transferred to Bancor, BNT would still be a bad coin to buy under the provided structure. This has everything to do with the purpose of the coin. Something that people indeed don't seem to care for, as 2bfree and ECB point out. Astonishing really. It will be very interesting to observe how this develops.
Fair enough.
So still the same point...
Maybe not a good investment, but not scam.
We need to be able to differentiate scams and poor investments.
Apparently they changed the reserve ratio to 10% rather than 20%. They take 90% of investors money while giving nothing useful in return. The liquidity you speak of shows no sign of being easier to trade with than Ethereum.
When John Law pulled this same trick 300 years ago, people tried to murder him (although it took a few years until people understood they were getting screwed). However, back then at least it did help a little because trading with actual gold and silver as people did back then is actually quite inconvenient. Despite that, he had to flee for his life and died a poor and lonely man in his 50s according to the history books. Did he scam the townsfolk? I don't blame you for saying either yes or no. In the end it is up to your perception.