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Seems like a pretty profitable scam that will remain viable for a while. Creating a token is basically free and with some slick advertising and community shilling you can create a social phenomenon that will make the scammer rich with very little risk (until the inevitable crackdown).

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any idae if there is any legality issues to something like this?

I'm not a lawyer, but I think this kind of stuff pretty clearly counts as fraud under existing law and that these ICO scammers in general would definitely be vulnerable to lawsuits, however:

A. The coin operators can remain anonymous. B. The coin operators could live in any jurisdiction. C. It's nearly impossible to prove that the operators are the ones who stole the token (which makes the scam particularly ideal).

Surely in the case of (C), at least in the contract described in the article, there would be a visible transaction showing that the contract owner caused the underflow, because only the contract owner can sign a transaction burning more tokens than there are in existence?

Indeed, ripping people off typically comes with plenty of legality issues.

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