Well, my prior for someone on the internet who's asking for money being scam is no less than 99% (and I do avoid pascal mugging by not taking strings from such sources as proper hypotheses), and I think that is a very common prior, so there better be good evidence that it isn't scam - a panel of accomplished scientists and engineers, working to save the world, etc etc. think something on the scale of IPCC. rather than some weak evidence that it is scam, and something even less convincing than e.g. Steorn's perpetual motion device.

Scamming works best by self deceit though, so even though you are almost certainly just a bunch of fraudsters, you still feel genuinely wronged and insulted by suggestion that you are, because the first people that you would have defrauded would have been yourselves. You'd also feel wronged that there is nothing you could of done to look better. There isn't; if your cause was genuine it would of been started decades ago by more qualified people.