It’s the marketing wing of Ethereum Foundation, so I consider them same thing. You won’t find this info on ethereum forums but thankfully ethereum fraud is well documented like in “chain of liars and thieves” write up.

I have no problem with centralized projects raising money VIA ICO never advertising themselves to be decentralized. But when you do, with this enormous incentivised flaw that renders all else irrelevant, you are deceiving people for profit — that’s literal definition of what a scam means.

There are ways to do this without this issue. There is PoW, there is proof of burn which is similar to ICO but all proceeds are automatically burned on submission which prevents recycling — counterparty (xcp) project did that.

A combination of proof of burn ico and EOS slow and long distribution design might be the closest thing to PoW we have, but then again, doing it on a centralized platform is once again adding a layer of trust where there doesn’t need to be one.