I know investors lost money with Mark Lyford's project, but there were no funds left to reimburse when he was forced to close it down due to lack of operating capital. That is not scamming.

Banx has been paying "dividends" until Q4 2015 out of "profits" (which means that Banx was supposedly operating at a profit) all the while trying to sell more shares using MLM. A few months later it was bust. Now how do you explain that a business that was so profitable that it could afford to pay dividends can burn all of its retained profits and capital in a couple of months and go bust because they didn't manage to sell more shares, all without a single good reason to explain that surprising blow up? Well the only explanation that makes sense is that banx wasn't making that much profits and had been paying dividends off share capital to keep new investors coming. That's called a ponzi scheme, and ponzi schemes are almost always scams unless they clearly advertize themselves as such. In the extremely unlikely event that Banx was victim of an unfortunate blackswan event, Lyford would be able to prove it easily by opening his accounting books and showing how all the income flows got squeezed and how all the capital went away. In the meantime, you can't blame people for applying Occam's razor and assuming that Banx was a ponzi scam.