Yes and no, con artists are pretty interesting from a psychological standpoint, and lack of willpower isn’t always incongruous with the traits required to be good at scamming people. In this case it certainly hurt, but in other cases it can make them appear more human, which can ultimately make them better at scamming people.
Sometimes con artists will even adopt an entirely affected vice or habit for the specific purpose of making people less suspicious of ulterior motives. I don’t think I’d chalk this guy up as a master con artist though. We live in the information era where people can look other people up online with very little effort, especially public figures like royalty. That, plus adopting a persona outside of your culture is extremely difficult to pull off, doubly so if you are impersonating someone of significant stature, and double that if it potentially involves having to speak, read, and write a language from that culture. I don’t know if the guy learned Arabic or not, but chances are pretty good that if he did, he wouldn’t have mastered it to the point where he’d be able to speak and write in a way that wouldn’t raise suspicion from a native speaker.
