IOTA is not a new Ether, but it doesn't mean it is a scam. Ethereum is a smart contract platform on blockchain. IOTA doesn't use the blockchain technology, instead it uses a technology called DAG (the same behind Byteball/Blackbytes).
Ethereum is a platform for decentralized applications (dApps), in which you can easily create custom tokens, and there are a lot of projects already being developed on top of it.
IOTA has a different purpose.. It is a digital currency for machines/devices in the Internet of Things. They don't have transaction fees and you can make transactions offline in a local branch of The Tangle and later sync with the main network.
I know more about Ethereum than I do about IOTA, I haven't studied it a lot yet, so I can't tell you if you could have applications built on it or other Ethereum-like features. But I think IOTA is very interesting.
This is a presentation from their Medium page:
https://blog.iota.org/a-primer-on-iota-with-presentation-e0a6eb2cc621