I'm not entirely convinced it was a con job, I think there was lack of academic rigor and the researchers that published were deeply overworked and underprepared. Publish or perish leads to mistakes on this scale or worse being published and accepted as fact dozens of times over on a daily basis.
Even though it's not a superconductor, does it have any interesting properties useful on an industrial scale? Or are there already other materials with similar properties that are easier to manufacture?