YouTube channel “TechLead” creator has created a crypto and pulled the rug

Suppose I see a guy on the street selling 1 dollar raffle tickets for a nearby sports car. If I buy the ticket knowing that I'm probably not going to win and there's a decent chance the guy on the street doesn't even own the car and is just going to run off - am I really getting scammed, or am I knowingly participating in a high risk and high reward bet?

With the Million Token thing, he's not even pretending that the token does anything. I had honestly understood it as a comedic illustration of the uselessness of cryptocurrency. You can buy into it and if you sell at the right time you might make money, but it is definitely a zero sum game. Is this a scam?

Obviously it's a scam if he promised he would buy the token at a minimum of 1 dollar and he isn't doing that. He should face whatever criminal or civil penalties are applicable if he's committing fraud. But, if he does what he said he would do, then it seems like a transparent bad odds gambling game where he gets a significant cut/advantage.

imagine digging dirt out of the ground in your backyard and claiming it has value

thats how i view crypto

The fact that he is being serious half of the time makes it funnier, IMO.

The SEC regulates how companies represent themselves to investors and how certain things representing ownership are traded and represented. The exact surface that fits inside the SEC I don't know exactly and one has to be an expert to know (and the SEC doesn't necessarily know itself).

Cryptocurrencies went from being completely outside regulation to somewhat inside, but the laws, courts, and regulations are starting to slowly catch up. Everyone is still figuring out things as they go along.

When cryptos are used to represent a piece of ownership though, it is cut and dry, they are securities and subject to existing regulations.

When cryptos don't correspond to the value of something external though, they are somewhat new and just don't yet fit into the existing regulatory framework and the attitude of regulators is generally wait and see while going after the most clear abuses and easy cases first to build up a framework for whatever the future will hold.

"common sense" of what cryptos are or aren't doesn't work, whatever regulators do, there will be high profile lawsuits for the courts to decide what they are and aren't, shaping this process and doing things which are clearly legal or illegal first in the best interests of the regulator is what happens. (in other words, they don't want to go out on a limb right away in tricky edge cases, they want to get things in a pattern and decided with the easy cases first)