There's money to be made if people are willing to mine and trade the coins. They're mined and then pumped and dumped then the miners move on to the next and then these newbs are left holding worthless coins. And newbies dont listen. They're naive and think that this new crapcoin will take them 'to the moon'. If you tell them it's a scam they and the devs will just say that you're jealous because you missed the train etc.
But it's not always like that, you can be lucky sometimes too. If you mine the right coin and sell soon enough, you can make profits with low hashrate too.