Just because extremely unfortunate things happen to a project doesn't mean it's a scam.

If anything, the fact that they kept moving on through all the crap that happened proves the exact opposite - any scammer or moneygrabber would've cashed out as soon as shit hit the fan. This project has gone through some of the worst possible crap imaginable and yet it's still here.
The dev team really wants to make this work and they're not afraid to fully commit to it, which is an attitude that is better than most projects of a similar valuation.