This scam went down hard. Looks like more of exit strategy than what bitconnect devs put on their website as cease & desist order, bad press and ddos attacks.
Scams will of course get bad press as prominent crypto community members including Buterin has warned. And those unlucky to have put their BTC in their own exchange flocked to get their "investments" out of their site. Unfortunately they'll find out that they will get BCC tokens which have drastically gone down in value.
BTC wroth $10010 exchanged to BCC (when rate was say 400$); scam exposed and exit from devs give 1 BCC = $150; $10010 ends up with 66.73 BCC; which value then crashed to say $25 ($7 at lowest in the week). Ends up with $1668. Ouch that's a huge loss for those gullible enough to put their eggs on it. But huge gain for the BCC devs since they've got the BTC.
That article and your response both show a complete lack of understanding of how it worked.
BITCONNECT NEVER TOOK ANY BTC AFTER THE ICO OVER A YEAR AGO. People were buying and selling the BCC and BTC
FROM EACH OTHER one way (sell BCC) to cash out and the other way (buy BCC) to lend and some may have also just have traded the coin. I suspect bitconnect also should have tried to profit on the exchange too (apart from the normal 0.25% exchange fees on volume traded - which wasn't small each day and in the millions of dollars).
Some might say this is the same as the 'greater fool' or bubble theory and they just expected someone else to pay a higher price and didn't care what they paid for the BCC but have you seen how the financial system and housing market operates lately?
Again, the lending wasn't a Ponzi as bitconnect always paid less interest than the growth of the coin so they made extra BCC coins from it not less (which is all they dealt with - it was just a convenience that they had their own exchange and accepted BTC deposits- others like Polynetwork started with just an external exchange and didn't accept BTC after the ICO but they now have an internal exchange too).