This is purely around price.  There are no publicly available or widely used ASIC scrypt devices in play.  Before the price went insane, LTC mining was slightly profitable (I have had a few cards hashing for a while) but with the price going up so much there seemed to be a much better ROI which in turn reduced risk.  With the coin price explosion, many people all of a sudden had "extra" funds to spend and why wouldn't they if they could get ROI in 30-45 days time...

Nothing special/secret about this one