I wasn't referring to language issues, of course not everyone has English as a first language. It's likely the agent who met the group with the board didn't either (in addition to not knowing the full background), and there has been something lost in translation at the time as to what or why this was happening.

But deceptive or scam or con are thrown out very easily these days and have specific and widely understood nefarious meanings which are rarely, if ever at all, correct.

Anyway we digress. In this case it's possible that the pax subsequently offloaded from the later delayed inbound (who will also have had confirmed and checked through BPs by the way) may have been too late to make the Athens or some other alternative flight, and some sort of greater good calculation was made. We don't know.

But the initial group 100% would not have been rerouted because QR did not fancy handling their luggage. And having mutinied it appears that initial group were subsequently reinstated.

Of course for most people it's everyone for themselves. C'est la vie, as the Germans say