I'm on the 'it's a scam' side of this coin. Just check twitter, 90% of all posts that even mention pi coin are from scammers shilling this 'coin' to people in promise that its going to get to 314k (pi, 3.14...)
Pretty sure they're stealing your data with their 'mining' app that you stick on your phone
My guess is that it's one of the requirement to shill this coin for them to withdraw their pi coins but that won't happen because like you said, this coin was a scam and only after the people's data (KYC). They are not contented with that but they also put ads inside their app.
It's crazy that those poor people are the ones who help them earn money. I have a friend who tried this before because he believes that this is going to be the next bitcoin. The op is right. This was really the impression of those people who got involved on a scam project like this. If only those people do their research more and read feedback from different sources, they will know the truth.