The website literally stated it was not for speculation, they didn't want the price to go up, and there were multiple ways to get some for free.

If people were reckless, greedy, and/or lazy because of the crypto hype and got "defrauded" without doing any amount of due diligence -- that's kinda the point.

I actually lost about $5k on cheapETH running servers. Nobody was "defrauded", I think these people don't understand how forks work. It's a precursor to the modern L2 stuff, I did this while writing the first version of Optimism's fraud prover. https://github.com/ethereum-optimism/cannon

I suspect most of the people who bring this up don't like me for other reasons, but with this they think they have something to latch on to. Doesn't matter that it isn't true and there wasn't a scam, they aren't going to look into it since it agrees with their narrative.