Who to accuse here? I don’t see anything citizen finance would be worried to lose here. They don't have a business profile here.
This thing will come to an end when you (and by that I mean bounty hunters in general) will stop joining bounty campaigns that are not escrowed by your bounty manager.
While you are right, this is also true that most projects don't want to hand over the fund to a campaign manager because campaign manager may scam too. We have seen such case a lot of times. If campaign manager scam the hunters, that will be a huge amount and it will have influence on the market too.
I have been offered to manage few campaigns but had to deny for such reason. Team doesn’t want to escrow the fund, doesn’t want to trust me. Well till this day, I have learnt that you are very unlikely to get a project to manage, if you have straight rules.
Considering the ICO price of token was $2.8 (and I guess bounty pool of 5000 CIFI was based on that price) and now it's ~$36
ATH was $381 according to coinmarketcap. That makes sense why they don't want to pay the hunters. We have seen such excuse a lot of times.