These guys are academics looking for funding of their research. The cannot get funding for their research from the usual sources, ie peer reviewed sources. So they are pulling the same trick as Baterroo, ie getting funding from the ignorant masses. Notice what they promise for your hard earned money. Your name on one of their papers published in a prestigious journal. Bullshit. If they could get their paper published in a prestigious journal they would not need your money.
I know this post is old, but I want to clear up what I think is a misconception, as well as give my perspective on why a genuine researcher (neither a scammer nor a kook) might be crowdfunding. As for the misconception, "peer-review" is a process by which articles are accepted to journals. There are not "peer-reviewed" sources of funding, to my knowledge. People are not paid by journals for submitted articles. Funding comes from people who are providing money, not peers. That could mean grants, either governmental or private, or an academic position that provides ample time for research (because it is expected for the job, and also usually requires some sort of teaching duty unless one is a rock star). The way the system works is if one is not in an academic position it is much harder to get funding through grants.
The author of the indiegogo seems to be somewhat of a nonconformist. The following is my firsthand knowledge of how things work in the math world. I assume physics is similar. The expected thing to do after one gets a PhD is to get a postdoc where one aggressively searches for publishable material. That means perhaps forgoing what one really wants to pursue in order to find a sufficient enough volume of publishable results to find a tenure-track job offer. Note that these publishable results should be in things that people are interested in hiring you for, and not merely perhaps good ideas. Institutions with, say, a strong commutative algebra department are going to look to hire people working in commutative algebra. So it helps to be in an in-demand field. If one does successfully get a tenure-track job offer then if one wants to be offered tenure at that institution then one again must aggressively pursue publishable results. Having read the indiegogo creator's book, it sounds like theoretical physics is a bit more tribal than mathematics. In mathematics I am aware of hiring fights between different fields in a department, each wanting to get more of what they are working on. I've also seen, for example, algebraists pooh pooh point-set topologists. But, if what is described in the book is true, there is a tribal attitude among string theorists and loop quantum gravitists (a word?) even as far as accepting the theories themselves and the work on them. That is, string theorists tend to gravitate together and Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) people tend to gravitate together. The author's theory is a bit of an off-shoot of LQG, but seems to very much be outside of it, and therefore of little interest or even evoking hostility from LQG-ists. That seems far beyond the difficulties one would have in mathematics. Although I do wonder the job opportunities for someone pursuing a field in math considered dead such as point-set topology. That's not to say that it would be impossible for the author to have got a job at a university if he so wished. He just would have had to forgo pursuing his real interests until he had tenure. That would be expected to be about 10 years, assuming one is successful (it can be done faster if one is very successful).
So the author says he didn't want to teach, and presumably he was unwilling to put his ideas aside for 10 years while he aggressively joined the publish or perish rat race. He got some grants but eventually the offers dried up. His partner in the project, a mathematician, did have an academic position, by the way. And together they wrote papers that were published in peer-reviewed journals. They published what the author claims is the beginnings of a theory worth pursuing (is it really? I have no idea), and the author wrote his promised book. I didn't contribute to the indiegogo. I hadn't even heard of it. But I did purchase and buy his book, which was worth the read. It talks about his philosophy and his process of developing the theory. It also describes the basics of the theory in extremely watered-down terms, for people with no physics or math background.
I don't think there was an attempt at fraud here. As I said, the papers that have been written have in general been accepted to peer-reviewed journals. The problem in the modern academic scene of working on the big ideas and on your own ideas is a very real one. The problem of working outside of the "hot zones" is again a very real one. I had a friend who was in math graduate school with me who got a PhD and pursued various different methods he could make money independently in a way that would leave him with time to do his own research, because of those very problems. He wanted to pursue the problems that he found interesting instead of joining the "find the smallest significant publishable result that will keep your ball rolling" rat race for 10 years. As far as I know he failed at finding such a way of making money and ended up working full time in software development, giving up his dream of math research. It seems the author here took it one step further, he pursued his interests anyway for 10 years without finding an independent means of making money, and finally, I guess when he felt he was out of all other funding options and had a body of work on the project he thought was respectable, opened a crowdfunding campaign.
Note that even if there really is something to this theory it's still going to take a trailblazer to take it up because an older physicist is unlikely to dive deep into something completely new and a young physicist is still going to face risks pursuing it. There've been times in the past where good ideas or insightful experimental observations were ignored for decades for one reason or another until they were finally taken up. Getting a new theory off the ground really takes a certain amount of marketing.