Agreed. The question isn't whether something is a financial scam; at this point, depending on your feelings about certain structures, a large part of the US economy is made up of financial scams. The question is whether it's a viable financial scam, and this one was so viable that the government had to step in.

Probably if they had invested in the right lobbyists and the right lawyers, they would have been able to engineer a level of indirection that this wouldn't have attracted attention.

Maybe they actually have, and will lose this case as millionaires.