I'm willing to give Intellivision Entertainment the benefit of the doubt that it didn't start off as a scam.  I'm willing to believe that they had good intentions in the beginning, and actually were committed to getting a product to market.  However, over time, their complete ineptitude gravitated them towards a situation that all but guaranteed whatever device they managed to complete at the end of the project would be dead on arrival.  For the Amico to ever have had a fighting chance in the marketplace to even carve out a tiny niche for itself, it needed to be priced within impulse buy range.  Something a mom or dad might see on a store shelf or online and think that it's cheap enough to be worth surprising their kids with for a birthday or Christmas gift.  AT their originally planned pricepoint of $149-$179, they would at least be positioning themselves to be a potential "holiday item".  And then, if the console and games were any good, word of mouth might start to do the rest.  Hardware price is important in the video game console space.  Recall that Sony infamously stole Sega's thunder at E3 1995 by simply walking to the podium and stating "$299" as the price for their upcoming PlayStation, right after Sega had already announced their Saturn would be $399.  And then recall how many PS2 owners backed away from buying a PS3 when its $499-$599 price points were announced.  Nintendo had to give the 3DS a price cut within 4 months of launch, because the mass market had determined $249 was too high a price for a dedicated handheld.  And last gen, Microsoft had to remove the Kinect from the XBox One to get its price down from $499, whereas Sony had launched the PS4 at $399 all along.

But, once Intellivision Entertainment started taking horribly negotiated loans which required the price of the console to increase to $249-$279, and again to $289-$339, they completely pushed themselves out of that impulse buy market and into the higher-end home console space already occupied by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.  I think at that point, when they continued doing investment rounds just to offset their previous bad loans, started selling boxed RFID cards as "Games" that a console didn't even exist yet to download them onto, all the while accumulating a growing list of refund requests from the average Joe who could see the writing on the wall (many of which go currently unanswered by IE), that's when they firmly moved into Scam territory.

There were some people in the retro community who were genuinely excited for the Amico (and some of them rabidly so), but IE priced themselves out of expanding beyond that base.  The Amico needed to be handled in such a way that small scale success would be profitable like Evercade or Playdate.  Instead, IE shot for the moon for some mind baffling reason.

This is the first time I looked into the Amico or the Atari VCS, and I have to say, who are these for? The price points on these things are ridiculous. You can get a Switch for cheaper. These things should be $150 at most. What the hell are these companies thinking?