That is one of the possibilities, and I am sure that there are those who falsely hack themselves in order to end up being victims, who then the majority will not accuse of having stolen their money. Playing on human sympathy is a powerful card, especially nowadays when there are very efficient ways of manipulating information.
Scam project cases from the category of alleged hacking occur a lot and the team tries to cover up their real identity (if they use the real identity on the whitepaper) to run away and remove traces of Twitter profile links, Linkendin and others, but unfortunately even though the project can be proven to be a fraud case, they don't report it that case because crypto regulations are illegal status of every country, so that case will be ignored. Scam scheme of hacking case will never go away even top projects will also experience the same case.