Realizing that the pre-orders were coming in via PayPal rather than bitcoin, and were therefore subject to chargeback, they decided there was enough potential to make money that it would be worth running a long con. So they took some of the pre-order money and put together a few plausible-looking fakes.
Wait; are you saying in only a few weeks some scammers (that one would generally expect to not know an asic from a 4004) who never intended to produce anything, managed to produce a completely professional looking and totally plausible PCB, custom housing, firmware and software thats not only good enough to fool someone like Inaba, but thats actually vastly better than all the other FPGA designs out there ? Seriously?