Maybe I just can't (or don't want to) believe that he scammed 19 bitcoins in the last ten months.

Not necessarily. As I mentioned earlier, the largest incoming TX is like 0.36 BTC / $15k, so he had at least that much at one point but it could be going in circles to make up the 19 BTC total. The whole shtick about a mysterious "exchanger" sounds about as contrived as the rest of the "mentor" story. If he was supposedly trading bank accounts, PayPal accounts etc it doesn't make much sense that he wouldn't be able to cash out his own bitcoins.