Well, imho, scam is not necessarily take away your money. If you give something (your time, your personal data, anything, your signature) because you are promised to be rewarded, but in the end the person/entity is breaking their promise, it might be called scam/fraud.
And BTW when you give your data freely they might sell it to some people, and many people willing to pay for personal data.
I actually agree with your statement right here man. I was scammed both by investing both time and money for an ICO. I did made a blog about a certain token last year. Yes, they did give me tokens only to find out that the dev team just run away and abandoned the project. It feels bad for me to experience that not just once, but few times already, and its just lessons learned.