> But that's a pretty dumb scam: act obnoxious then beg for (a lot of) money to compensate for your own mistakes?

It is the sort of dumb crap some humans try, and occasionally manage to get away with because other humans are chronically gullible. So it wouldn't be beyond the realms of reason that the agent couldn't have had relevant information in the training sets such that it generated such a plan and guardrail checks didn't flag it as a problem.