It gets more nefarious than you make out here.

What often happens in these tightly held "crowdsales", is that they're not heavily bought into by the crowd at all. In-fact, due to the huge volumes the insiders contribute to each mini crowdsale period, which was designed to allocate the coins based on your percentage contribution out of the total for that period, it meant that the majority of the coins actually went to the insider taking part in this.

And finally, to tie it all together, the juiciest and yet most profitable part of it all, is that the funds that were raised are frequently partially (or in some cases in full) refunded back to the buyer (insider) which can be as described above, recycled to obtain even more share of the EOS.

So, to recap:

• Create the illusion of a lot of crowdsale participation to fish for the uninformed whale investors who see large volumes.
• Gain essentially "free coins" through refunded ETH to the insider.
• Use refunded ETH to continually repeat above process.
• End up with fat stack of EOS, and most if not all of your ETH back.
• Vote the witnesses in to maintain control of the governance and hence emission schedule of coins.
• Meanwhile, drizzle sell the huge amounts of discounted (or free) EOS obtained in the crowd sale over many years whilst spending minimal amounts of money on furthering the project.