It's been so long since they've been doing that. The ICO has passed, the IEOs and as well as the new craze, the NFTs. They've been doing that and deceiving a lot of investors.
Because it's easy to make a new coin through contracts and chains, these scammers will do everything to make their project and swindle the money of the innocent investors especially the newbies.
That's why just follow the standard protocol of research when investing in a new, whatever if it was ICO, IEO, NFT or anything similar to the new craze in the future. If you do your research properly, you won't get scam by lazy new coins base on smart contracts or smart chains unless you're really unlucky/.
Sometimes things just fail, and not scam not steal not hacked, just fail. That is the hardest thing to figure out. I have seen projects who had amazing founders team, amazing idea, amazing budget, and still failed because people didn't care enough about it at all.
It was basically an idea to make crypto ecommerce world, all the amazon, ebay and so forth stuff that you know, it would be like that with its own coin as well as chain tied to products as well and they actually had thousands upon thousands of products as well which was awesome, tested it, got the delivery as well, it was seriously just amazing. What happened? I happen to just end up with a shitcoin because people just didn't want to buy stuff from there, since people didn't use that place, the price couldn't stay high and it tanked. There were no bad people involved, the idea just tanked.