I can't believe it is a scam.I originally wanted to join this project.I didn't do this later.It seems that I have a correct decision.
ETCV fork was fishy and suspicious from first time when it launches because a lot of responsible forum members starting research and they asking about ETCV team. Actually which people working behind the scene because team development was hidden.There were tons of negative news about them pretty quickly after they wanted to launch their fork and as you said well known members also raised concerns.
The problem are also many fake bitcointalk account that push scam project just to let some body to buy scam coin..really sad! This project was scam since longe time and many time i did advice too about it but many other complete ingnored the message.
Yes but very often those are all newbie accounts and therefore relatively easy to detect that it could be a scam. And also as the poster before said, the giant bounty pool was just suspicious.
He really thinks people are stupid enough to fell victim on his tactics. 
