All the these stories are not the first or would be the last,people especially newbies wants to be a part of something that will be huge in the future like what happen to bitcoin,but do not know what or where to invest properly,they looked on the promised not on the features..
I don't feel sorry for people who were greedy, or those who were speculating (that's their biz model: 99 crappy coins are expected to fail, 1 breaks out and makes bank), but I do feel sorry for the people naive enough to believe that the value of this coin would stay constant, and that they were guaranteed to turn a small or even zero investment into something that could change their life.
It does defy logic though, why would the dev be selling coins for a few cents to lucky buyers when they were supposedly worth a dollar? It wasn't even a vague "this could go as high as a dollar in the future, so buy and wait" claim; the topic still says GUARANTEED VALUE.
Only takes a small percentage of suckers to pull off the scam. I guess Ben Johnson/Ben Grenier will be looking for a new angle once he's milked this one dry.