I think this is not accurate. It's more likely accurate to state that their use is not tested in courts. But if you could show corporate communications indicating "such and such mechanism will be how we track obligations to shareholders or creditors" and establish that the tokens were not paid back per the operations of the token mechanism, then in all likelihood a court would agree and find evidence of damages and/or criminal wrongdoing.
Lawyers strike me as a particularly pedantic crowd (similar to programmers) and I would suppose if pressed about such tokens they'd say "this is a grey area because there's no precedent here yet." But AFAICT intent trumps everything else. If you make a new contract that's not called a contract but smells like a contract and get everyone to agree to it but not write their signature on paper, you have not dodged responsibility.
OTOH regulators like SEC might balk and throw their hands up at things like this and claim that they're not securities or that it's out of their scope. But district attorneys, attorneys general -- they probably wouldn't back down from a case like this if it happened to constituents that they think are important enough to stand up for.