I don't believe that they intentionally wanted to scam people.
If you observe how scam websites disappear, you'll see they have something in common: the site starts making selective payments for a while, allowing other people to continue depositing money into the site hoping they will be paid, and they don't believe it when people who haven't been paid accuse the site of not paying them. When the site owners collect the desired amount, they disappear. In my opinion, this website was sold to someone else, and that person later realized the business was unsustainable. To recoup all the money they spent buying the website, they chose to scam.
If they will really make a run, why they will they take care of putting those messages of closing? or close deposit with a warning? or be so stupid to send funds to KYC exchange .?
This could be a strategy for them to buy enough time to erase all traces that lead to their real identity. Notice that the site has had the same problem for months and no one from the site has ever come forward to say anything, but suddenly, when someone posts that there's a chance of discovering their real identity, that's when the site owners appeared with news. It's clear they want to buy time to disappear completely.
That is by far the most sensible explanation of the situation going on with freebitco.in
It's evident that freebitco.in ownership was changed since TheQuin disappeared like he never existed.
The past owner thought it would be the best to sell the site for a good amount of money and he did exactly that.
If the site was still profitable then nobody in their right senses would chose to end up the services like this.
So yeah they thought it would be the best to scam the users to recover the money they had invested in it.