As far as I'm concerned they could not even need to mine the tokens and just create them from scratch with programming in no time. I keep seeing a shitload of pre-ico and ico offerings sponsored by countless ads offering a new coin that is 'decentralized' and I keep asking the essential questions, as someone who knows a little bit about cryptocurrencies, yet I fail to understand their logic.
If you can't mine it, how can you support it? Who handles the transactions, yourself? Who gets the initial tokens? The ICO developer? What is the potential scalability where there are no decentralized computers mining for the rewards and at the same time supporting the network?
My best advice is, if you can't somehow mine it, you technically can't support the network, they will probably take your money to build their own servers and there goes your scalability, so DON'T BUY IT.