Yes, I will still regard them as scam because if they received TON from 80% of participants, then they should distribute to all those people that paid that fee. If they would only pay to 15%, when then did they accept fee from everyone? They need to return their ton back if they will not give them any reward.
requiring payment without guarantee that they will give out something is a scam, there are other thing that are similar to this called pre-sale but the thing is, presale guarantee token allocation for anyone who bought the token, but requiring payment without giving something in return but empty promise, is pretty much a scam.
I wish people can see through this fat lie, but I know some people are so blinded with the prospect of receiving dreamy returns.You know, the reason why they will only pay a few people is just to kind of make a fulfillment where some people will think that, "after-all, they paid and people that didn't receive were unlucky or didn't do the right thing that will qualify them to get their reward." There's no trick that any of these airdrop developers will play that am not familiar with.
For one of those airdrop that I created a thread for just this week, they requested for 0.5 TON from the airdrop participants and lastly they made an announcement regarding that distribution procedure and from what I understand, they will only distribute 50% reward to each qualified participants and the remaining 50% will be sent to them after 6 months. Years back, I had similar experience with one airdrop and after the first round of distribution, before it could get to the second round, the project has already collapsed.