To be fair, that seem to be a straight up Ponzi. There were not much details in the news but it seems they were sold btc for a high price and that there were recruitment involved.
I'm honestly done with bitcoin being in the news every week. They are saying that "bitcoin" is a scam when in fact bitcoin was the only currency that was used in scamming people. There's tons of online paluwagan (ponzi scheme) on facebook and what they do when they are going to get out of the scenario (once they have accumulated enough amount of money), they edit a screenshot of their coins.ph account and makes it look like the account that's holding all of the funds got frozen by coinsph. In the news, it was clearly an online paluwagan and that bitcoin was the only currency that was used in scamming the people. Now, this question arises, how does that differ from people scamming other people using fiat money? There's none. They are just trying to make bitcoin look bad in the media so people would frown upon it. On the other hand, there are still shows that are educating people about bitcoin, about what it actually is.
And of course the Philippines keeps on posting stuffs like "Bitcoin scam" so they can make bitcoin look bad. I would not wonder, though, because there's tons of cryptomillionaires in the Philippines and they can't collect tax from them except from VAT.
Me everytime I watch the news and they are talking about BITCOIN (itself) scamming people: "Oh wow, same shit."
I agree with what you're saying especially those online paluwagan (Ponzi schemes) that are still rampant on Facebook. Bitcoin was just used as a transaction method yet it's being blamed everytime a scam happens. This is the reason why most Filipino I talk to have this negative perception on cryptocurrencies and when I ask them why it's considered a scam, most of them just say that they saw it in the news. When I ask a followup question about it, they really don't know why except that they heard it in the news.
Some companies actually declare that they do cloud mining, yet they do not have any details as to how they do it. Most investors get scammed due to the massive returns that they see from investing, not knowing how they really make money off it.