HyperQuant reserves the right to modify the terms of the campaign including but not limiting to the percentage of bounty channels allocation.
If they wrote "Rewards will be reduced if X campaign gets less than X numbers of participants" then we would agree with them. But they did not and their statement can be interpreted in a few ways and because of their bounty manager's mistake during the campaign and a few scammers, the team is denying the rightful amount of payment to those who deserve.
There is basically one way to interpret their statement... here, I will translate into plain english: "We can do whatever we like"
That is the exact meaning of "HyperQuant reserves the right to modify the terms of the campaign". If this statement was posted on their original announcement, then all users who signed up, did so accepting the fact that the team could basically change the campaign in any way they wanted. If that clause was added later, then that would be unacceptable.
Is that ethical? Not in my opinion... am I surprised? Not really...