Sometimes you need to break some laws to make progress that does not make it a scam. Sometimes the existing laws hurt consumers breaking such laws is good not bad.
This kind of thinking is less well received in Europe, which is why e.g. so many cities banned uber and only let them back in as a registered taxi app to contact registered taxi drivers charging regulated taxi prices, while a lot of US cities turned a blind eye.
Those same regulations also kept a higher floor of taxi quality, which helped avoid the stereotype that exists in the US of "regular taxis are always dirty and late", so there wasn't consumer outcry for their return like US cities which had tried banning them.
It's like uber, a taxi service without drivers/cars.