It was clearly a scam. They couldn't/didn't ship products that they had in hand. The fact that there weren't a ton of customers screaming like in the BFL threads was a clue that he was lying about how much there was in preorders.
The claim that money was lost in Gox was also a clue because the money in gox was allegedly from preorders and the reason for the preorders was to raise funds for making hardware. How could he make hardware if all the assets were sitting in Gox?
Taking money from you rubes and not doing anything is not a failure, it's a scam. One that people fell for over and over again back then.
It's long time ago so did he really have the products he wanted to create? I believe he only bought miners from another company. Why should he do that when he really was able to create his own miners?
Taking preorders is not like an investment, right, though a scam would be when you take preorders knowing you won't deliver. Saying that, it might be that he knew at some point and still presold. So at that time it might be possible to say it was a scam at least.
He had hashfast miners in hand and didn't deliver. Scam
Can you come up with an explanation for all those coins on Gox that doesn't end in scam?
Either he was lying about them being there (was there any proof?)
Or they were preorder money from customers (that there's still no proof of) that should have been cashed out to pay for development/expenses/whatever or held in a wallet he controlled until needed.
Or they were the coins you geniuses gave him for the same reasons a the "customers," and all the same reasons that they shouldn't have been on Gox apply to those coins also.
Not to mention that this paragraph:
Intellihash (TM)
Intellishash (TM) is a unique in-house process designed by ACtM and its engineering team which extends or boosts the usefull hashing life of Bitcoin mining ASIC's. For commercial reasons the full details of this technology are confidential. The process can be applied to ACtM chips and will boost chip lifetime-performance as hash-difficulty rises. The percentage of increased life-time efficiency over a standard ASIC chip is not public knowledge, but the boost is expected to be significant over non-Intellishash capable chips (ie competitors chips).
is 100% bullshit aka SCAM