> If he's actually that good for real, I'm surprised why he won't want to do it legit, he'd go way further than scamming people

If you can get and hold dozens of concurrent full-time engineering jobs by scamming people, you can get much further much more quickly than is possible in any one of the full-time engineering jobs you can get.

This is obviously unethical, relies on non-guaranteed success, and falls apart if people are able to effectively claw back your gains from scamming, but that's not (obviously) enough to outweigh the desire for quick returns for some people.