If scamming something like this is possible, the scammers have an incentive to scam as much as possible, so the "scam ratio" will tend to grow to 100% quite fast unless there's a huge amount of legitimate business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355342
but unfortunately the link no longer has file, is there any chance you still have the chat log? i would be incredibly helpful.
Thanks