Do people actually scoop others? I was wondering if there are real faculty members who go to conferences or read the abstracts (if it's being published) and scoop others? 

If not why some professors are so paranoid? IMHO A real entrepreneur would love to share his ideas and maybe someone else would do it instead of him. Consider Elon Musk for example who shares his ideas on Twitter. I would argue that Einstein wouldn't care if someone else had created general relativity.
At least in chemistry the information you get at conferences is usually (nearly) done work. The presenter has at least a very big head start so it's nearly impossible to take an idea there and do it yourself even faster.

A bigger problem are grant proposals. Here most of the time no or only little work on this topic has been done so it's actually possible to scoop others and in addition as a reviewer you can prevent the proposal from going through. We had that happen before where a reviewer wrote absolutely wrong and nonsense statements to get the proposal killed, most likely to copy that idea since he works on the same topic.