First, to be clear, I have nothing to do with the Kickico project.
I have no doubts about that, nor I ever thought that.
hey plan to make a profit from traders fee, which is completely legitimate and all exchanges do that. How much referral level they plan to have doesn't really matter. Of course, they will say "get free $5" not "spend $10 on tx's fee to get free $5" or "you will be paid up to xx level of referral, although it will only be dust".
Usually, all promotions and free money are looking for something in return but this is only mentioned at the end. As long as they really pay off with money that came from real income, not taken from investors, this promotion is legal.
I didn't say its illegal, I just said that is pyramid scheme type of referral as I don't any other legit exchange that has similar referral system. For me that's a big red flag, to see 10 level referral system as I found them only in scams.
Something completely different is the question of whether it is really worth it. I see on freebitco.in the faucet, usually claim is 1 satoshi. Whether they are fraudsters if advertised "get free Bitcoin..." although we know that it is almost an impossible mission to raise the required amount for withdrawing.
You are forgetting one important thing here; KICKICO sent their worthless useless locked tokens to huge amount of people who never wanted it, nor they ever asked for it. But before they did that, they pumped the token so people think they got something that will have some worth. But in order to get those shitcoin, you have to trade on their exchange. This is pure spam technique, and if you try something like that on bitcointalk forum, you would get banned.
Their marketing technique may be legit/legal, but no decent exchange would so something like that, to attract users by baiting them, sending unsolicited tokens. Well, I personally would never use exchange or any other business that uses that. Its just when I see someone marketing something so aggressively, that's a huge red flag for me.