Are you seriously planning to raise 500 million dollars? To me such a fundraising goal is complete garbage and it doesn't make your project look more serious than others in any way.
It just looks to be shady at the moment and any money sent to them would go as a donation. So 500M is also less when you look from this perspective.
It's funny because they think it looks impressive to the visitors of this thread. To me it looks just ridiculous and makes it shady as you say.