Let me answer some of your concerns here. For one thing, All Cryptocurrency is unregulated. Poloniex and Bittrex are unregulated. They could take everyone's coins in a flash that is left in their vaults and legally we could not do anything about it. There is a certain amount of TRUST that goes into investing in this market.
Bitconnect of course uses there bots to trade USD/BTC. They even state this on their website. The volatility of the USD/BTC pair. So, yes, they take your Bitcoin to trade with and give you their token in return plus trade your Bitcoin and earn a good ROI.
Is BCC riding on the coat-tail of Bitcoin? Of course, but so is every other Crypto out there. They are generating a good income by allow their coins to be sold and most loan their coin back to them allowing the to sell them on their exchange. They make money on the coin and on running the exchange. So, they have three sources of income and we all get a fair share of the income. This is a good business model. I am not thrilled of the referral program but that is the way most online companies are doing business these days. I guess it is cheaper than advertising and generates an income to the person working at getting them more business. It seems to be a win/win for everyone.
By the way, Bitconnect has just got into the top 10 of all coins in market cap. The BCC also is the most stable of any crypto out there except for Tether.
No, Poloniex and Bittrex could not just take everyone's coins and run. There would be a class action civil and most definitely a legal lawsuit against them, just like there currently is against Mark Karpelas. We also know who is operating them, we do not know who is behind the doors at Bitconnect, or at least we hardly know anything.
If you want to know what happens when you run a ponzi, look no further than OneCoin, which was declared a ponzi just today:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/onecoin-is-much-ponzi-indian-police-chief-confirms-clear-ponzi-schemeOneCoin was huge and lured in victims from all over the world. Just a few months ago, it had a market cap in the billions, higher than ETH and second only to BTC itself. Some people though it was going to overtake BTC. Today it is worth 0.
The only name I could get a Google search result from was Yuris Prasetya. Who I found is part of the Bitconnect team listed here:
https://bitconnect.co/system-news/61/bitconnect-is-opening-their-office-in-jakarta-on-the-7th-of-july-2017Although I don't speak Indonesian, what I find quite interesting, is that he was a promoter of OneCoin. Here is a video he posted last year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVxLbvD-734If Bitconnect is bot trading USD/BTC pairs, then what exchanges are they trading on? They clearly state that there is "No risk." The closest you can come to no risk is an arbitrage and even that has risk, so they need to state which exchanges they are arbitraging so a risk profile can be analyzed. I know people who have arbitraged and they do not earn returns like that. If they are day trading with long and short positions, then they have exposure risk.
As a business, I will say that Bitconnect is very opaque. There is no whitepaper or technical details. Just a give us your money campaign.