As you pointed out attitude changed after speaking with one of the scammers. Psychology 101, personal contact evokes sympathy and trustingness. This is classical Stockholm syndrome . Its hard to call someone a scammer (even real scammers) once he tells you his life story, shows off pictures of kids/dog, and makes a lot of promises.
That happened to me with the Orsto smart watch scam.
The owner didn't like all the negative talk about it on the forum here and contacted me with a bleeding heart story, "facts", and all sorts of other stuff to prove he was being mis-represented.
Although there was still the faint whiff of BS, he sounded pretty darn genuine, and it made me at least give him the benefit of the doubt at the time (but I still didn't pull posts, or go and publicly defend him). Then I discovered that it was all BS and he had set up a fake account on the forum, and then he lied about it when confronted.