Sounds like NXT where it became a top 3 coin despite being a huge scam (now it's ranked 79).
Just looking at the BCC wallets, it looks like 93.36% of all BCC coins belongs to just 100 people:
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/bcc/#!rich
So even if you have just 1 BCC for $200, that doesn't matter as just the top 10 people alone have around 6 million coins out of a total of 8 million coins.
If that is not a scam, I don't know what is.
NXT was publicly announced, you shouldn't call it a scam only because only 72 people were first adopters. It is a real issue with the coin, but the technology itself is legit.