Joseph,
Who are you kidding? We don’t have to believe this story at all to know many instances of people we know in our own lives (and maybe even us in certain instances) who do the same thing. Contractors who only take cash, service providers who ask you to write the check to their tuition or landlord, and many other stories that we may know firsthand. It’s worth learning from this even if it is not true because so many of us know real stories anyway.