It's not that they lied about it being complete, it's that they entirely changed the scope of the game around 2014ish. If I remember correctly they even had a poll asking the community if they'd rather wait for planetary landing which was originally not meant to be in the game.

The original game was freelancer 2.0. you don't land on a planet, you get into a cutscene and then appear in "New Atlantis" (yes I'm referring to star field, that's not a city in SC) then as the story goes a developer made a tech demonstration they called "pupil to planet" showing the ability to continually zoom out from, you guessed it, looking at a pupil and going all the way to space with no loading screen so the had to essentially rework the game from the ground up. The story and a lot of the assets/voice work, etc was all done and "ready" for what that game would have been, but since the change they now had to rebuild a lot of the systems and make new systems for the way the game works now. That's just squadron 42 (the single player game) star citizen the MMO has always been a bit on the "back burner" waiting for SQ42 to complete.

Now that we're past all that, and just this last weekend SC had a majorly important tech test that seemed to go very well, they're putting the last foundational pieces together so they can actually complete the game.

If anyone wants to say it took too long, I'm with you. I backed in 2014 and thought "damn, answer the call 2016? That's a long ass time." but to say it's a scam? They're the dumbest bunch of scammers in the entire history of scamming, Nigerian princes and all, if this is supposed to be a scam.