Cryptocurrencies exist to move money out of China by circumventing their currency controls (pay miners in RMB locally, get crypto, send it to Hong Kong, exchange into USD). ICOs are a byproduct of that process and exist merely for scam.
Again, i am not against scam. Scam is fine as long as you aren't getting caught - nearly everything in software in scam directly or indirectly. It's just trying to do scam in the open and getting surprising it's hard is what crosses my mental limits of acceptable chutzpah.