Very similar situation with my wife’s coworker. The coworker met some dude on a dating site and they connected pretty quickly. She even traveled to meet up with him in another city a few hours away by plane. Surprisingly he never showed up and claimed some lame excuse. In the end she “invested” 200k with him in crypto and POOF he was gone like Keyser Soze. So sad.
I’m betting this actually was a scam but the initial replies tipped off the scammer that it wasn’t gonna work. So the scammer played along as well. At least that’s my theory.