Religion is utterly malleable and not infrequently used by pathological scammers to defraud people

I could say that about every other aspect of human life. Since everything can be used for fraud. Science in the same way as religion.
We both know that is, what always happened and what will continue to happen. Arguing in this way, I as well could say that scientific institutions are as much corrupted as the religious institutions are corrupted.
That would not make neither science nor religion superfluous.