The problem is, they put the word in the title of their coin release. When you go and read through the coin description, it makes no mention of "oh, we might have zerocoin 2 years from now if it actually works". Their coin description implies that's it's already in there. All the random idiots on the forum just assumed the coin had it already and started to pump the coin not even knowing what Zerocoin is.
I may be wrong, or it was added in later, but I thought the Dreamcoin dev did mention it's a work in progress or something similar to that. Of course that does require people to read the entire ann thread, which I guess some people don't do here. It's also possible he just added that in later, after people got interested in the coin... or I am remembering wrong.
And yes, it's certainly on the shady side of things, although if the info is out there somewhere, I'm not sure I'd say it's an outright scam.