I also don't understand this logic - what's the point of blocking tokens if the listing is not yet available.
The token locking is a good thing in general, it protects the token price from being trashed in DEX.
But on the other hand, if it were a fraud, they would not give out anything. Perhaps the team is planning to get a very good listing: binance or bittrex - then everything is logical, we just have to wait.
Binance choses which tokens they list not the other way around, they will not list token which such a horrible team. I suppose the same goes for Bittrex.