They also put billions of dollars of venture capital into it. Ripple wouldn't be worth what it is today without that.

Ripple allows you to move USD, BTC, or any currency using distributed ledger system. You dont need to use "the coins" created by Ripple.

As a separate point -- by your logic, bitcoin is a complete scam created by Satoshi Nakamoto who created a currency then gave himself $400mm worth of it. [1]

And Google is a complete scam created by Larry and Sergei, who created equity and gave themselves all of it.

[1] http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto....

I don't know anything about ripple, but that's true of everything ever made. He'll, I've made my own currency and have all the coins. Trading them for real stuff is kind of hard, though.