It makes you wonder why Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Gregory Olsen, Anousheh Ansari, Charles Simonyi, Richard Garriott and Guy Laliberte didn't demand their money back!
Each one of these private individuals paid between $20 and $40 million dollars for a 7 to 10 day trip to the ISS. One presumes that if the ISS doesn't exist, they'd have been pretty pissed at the Russians for taking their money. Instead, they all seemed very happy about their visit there.
In 1990, TBS (a Japanese TV station) paid $28 million to send one of their reporters to Mir. Toyohiro Akiyama was a 20 year veteran reporter at the time, with a reputation for honest reporting. He was later promoted to deputy director of TBS. He never mentioned a thing about the whole affair being a fake. Which is odd because he'd have had nothing to lose and everything to gain by telling the truth.