"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" usually applies to stuff like this.
On a related note, I fear that the current state of science and the "common people's" understanding have drifted so far apart in the last 50 years or so that most people (including journalists) really just believe anything. Like even somewhat educated celebrities who are looked at as "smart" or even graduated arts/humanities scholars have not the slightest clue why the sky is blue or why it's cold in winter (well, in the northern hemisphere). Actually, even most intelligent people don't feel the slightest desire to understand how something is working and therefore are unable to question scams. Like they could understand the working mechanism if you would explain it to them, but they just give a shit and thus would immediately forget about it anyway.
What makes this worse is that the quality of journalism has declined in the last 10-20 years due to several reasons, most of them directly related to the rise of the world wide web. There are so many web sites that need to create a constant flow of science/technology news that it's somewhat unavoidable that they just publish anything they get even if it's just the fantasy product of some designer who has not the slightest idea about engineering or science.
It's ironic that when I was young, I dreamed of a world where I could have easy access to science news and all kind of information and now that I have it, it's an "all-knowing trash heap" where you can easily access information that is at least partly wrong most of the time.