You trust unverifiable claims above published and peer-reviewed evaluations?
Is this because the unverifiable claims support your contentions and beliefs instead of refute them?
How much credence would you give these claims if the situation were reversed?
Of course there have been frauds. There is fraud in every endeavor in life. Just because Bernie Madoff is a trickster doesn't mean your corner banker is stealing from your kid's piggy bank.
You really have to use discernment with peer review and with stuff published by certain groups of scientists. For example, there was tons of peer-reviewd stuff published by Eugenists. It was peer reviewd by other eugenists. The public of course thought that what they were hearing was real science. Alfred Ploetz and other race hygienists started up the Archiv fur Rassen und Gesellschaftsbiologie with the view to giving a respectable forum for their views. Big names like Haeckel and Weismann lent their support. The AAAS published lots of science papers by eugenists, e.g., Conklin etc. That gave them credibility. Not surprisingly because the AAAS was run by eugenists. The Monist journal was a raving atheist evolutionary rag which solicited science papers from big names. The big names lent the journal credibility. Paul Carus, the editor, and his group would inject crazy articles about "Pagan Jesus" and so on. But since that tripe appeared in journals alongside Boltzmann and Poincare, people thought this was the latest in peer-reviewed science. I mean, one simply has to use one's brain when reading science papers, and not just say that, because it's in some journal, it must be the freshest waters of truth or whatnot.