What is now the truth ?
Are they scammers or not ?
bad communicators ... yes
poor project managers ... probably
but scammers ... no ... they are delivering, so can't say they are scammers
Lets say you sell Tommy Hilfiger t-shirts and they're in style but your out and a sales man walks in and gives you a sweet deal 1,000,000 t-shirts for 5 bucks each. In your mind your thinking "shit I'll make a killing on these if I sell them for 35 bucks each" In the retail stores they're about 90 dollars.
So you wait and a month goes buy and you decide to call the sales man. He says he's working hard on getting the shirts made and the products are back logged and it will take another month at the most but he's pretty sure he will have it sooner but just to be sure he does not want to give you a firm ship date.
6 months goes by and you are seeing the fad slowly dieing but thats ok you can still sell them for 20 dollars each. Now keep in mind you are not the only purchaser and they're are 500,000 others that have pre-paid for 1,000,000 t-shirts and are waiting.
3 more months go by and some ask for their refunds and get it, while others still think they can turn a profit and believe that the sales man will deliver these shirts.
Now in retail stores they are still selling these shirts for 45 dollars and people are still buying them. They used to be 75 dollars a month ago and now they seem to be a great deal.
As more refund requests pour in the manufacturer advertises the price of the 1,000,000 pre-orders have gone to 10 dollars. So now some of those that are waiting for the t-shirts are wondering if they cancel now ordering them later when they have them available will be bad for their profit so they hang in there. After all they got in early and for 5 bucks.
However now the fad is slowly dieing and the manufacturer starts to sell the t-shirts directly to the public for 20 dollars and every dam person out there has a Tommy Hilfiger shirt.
The manufacturer knows that soon the fad will be over and they used the pre-order money to build the facility to create the t-shirts and need to make the money before the fad runs out. So now they really start pumping out t-shirts and ship some out to show the other pre-orders that its not a scam but they're very slow at it and the back log seems hopeless.
The manufacturer is now sitting on huge sums of money from selling directly to the public for 20 dollars and start pumping out pre-orders but not the 5 dollar ones first. They start pumping out the later 10 dollar pre-orders first.
Now everyone has a t-shirt and the fad is over so everyone who asks for their refund gets it back. The ones that held on gets 5 dollar t-shirt or can request for his refund and no one breaks the law. Its all legal.
Is that a scam?