You are blindly calling it a scam without even looking into what has changed in the last 23 years...
For the first time since 1989, we now have more and more accounts of reliable experiments producing anomalous heat. This is why research activity around cold fusion / LENR has significantly increased in the past 12 months! I am just reporting the news.
If this were real, the way to start would be for the whole research set was released free into the public domain, putative patents included, so that the originator could not in any conceivable way make money off it.
If this were real, that would be the responsible thing to do.