The only danger will be to someone's bank account. Anyone who couldn't tell this was a scam almost deserves to be separated from their money as a sort of fiscal Darwin award. There is not and never will be an actual mission to anywhere though this scam. Furthermore I'm tired of hearing about it and don't know why slashdot continues to give these scammers free publicity.
I wish an attorney general with appropriate jurisdiction would get involved and put the people behind this in jail.
Not necessarily, the world if full of people working on terrible start up ideas, why should Mars One be any different?
The media is evidence of this, the Mars One project isn't exactly hiding much, sure there's a lot of BS around how well they're doing but they're not claiming they have a secret game changing tech or shadow billionaire who's going to change everything. The problems are there for everyone to see, the reason they're getting ignored is that the idea is so infectious that the traditional media is generally playing along, and if the even media is getting caught up then why do you think the founders would be immune? They're going to be drinking the koolaid harder than anyone.
Most likely the founders thought this was the greatest idea ever, they figured if you got the ball rolling, maybe enticed a billionaire or two, then you could put together a crowd-funded project on a global scale. At that point the talent and money would start rolling in and you'd get a legitimate Apollo Mission style project with a real shot at Mars. It doesn't have a hope in hell of happening but it's an intoxicating idea.