Setting up commercial ventures based on speculative hypotheses is what a large chunk of Hacker News does for a living.

Those sort of things are always a bit grey and (IMHO) a bit sketchy, but it's worth noting that it's a bit costly to even test the ideas. Starting a business is a decent way to raise the capital to run the experiment, since grant money is likely far harder to get. But, yeah, doing it that way also really makes it basically impossible to be unbiased.

Let a few more rounds of experimentation and refutation go through, and if it's clear it can't work at all, and they stay in business without pivoting, then we can breeze right past hoax and jump to fraud. Time will tell about it, I guess.