PayCoin was not scam coin in the first place, not entirely.
It probably was. Look at the history of GAW - how can it be a legitimate business when they completely changed and abandoned everything they offered, multiple times in 1 year? In 2014 GAW was an internet service provider, then changed to a mining hardware reseller, then changed to a cloud mining service, then changed to an altcoin startup fundraiser, then changed to a payment processor, bought coin-swap.com, and "bought" (rented) btc.com just so they could "kill Bitcoin" with their new altcoin. All in 2014. And they stopped selling hardware, stopped selling cloud mining, shut down zenminer, shut down coin-swap.com, shut down btc.com, stopped selling Hashcoins and changed it to Paycoin.
So...what does GAW do? What is their business? What is their purpose? Nothing but taking people's money and then leaving people holding bags. They took orders for mining hardware that never shipped. When people wanted their money back for those mining rigs, they were offered cloud mining to earn
BTC. When people wanted their
BTC, they were offered Hashpoints. When people wanted their Hashpoints, they were offered Paycoins valued at $20. When people wanted their $20, they were offered Prime Stakelets or some bullshit. When people wanted their profits from that, they were offered an Honor Program to be fulfilled at a later date (which might take over 30 years, according to the official promised plan).
Every step of the way they were switching to something new, all designed to delay the inevitable collapse and string people along just a little more. They were selling imaginary hash and paying small returns from the
BTC they were taking in. Obviously it couldn't last forever, because eventually people would want to withdraw all their
BTC, and there wouldn't be enough
BTC.
So they switched people over to Hashpoints, and that's the most important part of the story. Everything else after that was just more misdirection, because they had already taken people's bitcoin and swapped it for something they made up for free.
At that point, they could've just launched their altcoin, let it fail, and said "oh well". But people were so willing to throw more money into it, and GAW was so greedy, that they kept making more false promises and even sold "cloud staking" which is a ridiculous concept. The whole point of staking is that it doesn't require special hardware or excessive electricity, so why would anyone pay someone else to stake for them? Meanwhile, the original Paycoin is still going, and GAW's XPY Paycoin is nothing more than Peercoin copied-and-pasted with a new name - when they first released the wallet, it still said "Peercoin" in some places. All they did was find-and-replace one word, and they couldn't even find-and-replace that one word properly. So a child could have "developed" the coin better than they did.
And after all that, after all the lies and scams and betrayals we've seen, Darkcoin still came along and decided to steal another coin's name.