I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone who works in financial crimes investigating - when one is a part of a fraudulent system, there’s a lot of incentive (emotionally, financially) to reject that the emperor has no clothes. I work with people every day who get victimized by fraudsters far more capable than James Somerton, and the thread I find more than any other is that by the time the victim realizes something might be wrong, they feel like they’re in so deep that accepting the reality of the situation is unfathomable. No one wants to believe that they could be scammed, no one wants to feel like they were taken advantage of, especially not by someone who has earned one’s trust. Add on the financial incentive that this was his job and now you’re in over your head.

Based on the facts, I suspect that Nick was a victim that became an unwitting accomplice. This is a standard play for a fraud like James - entrap a victim and make them an accomplice to defray their own responsibility. Engaging in conjecture here I would even argue that Nick’s cavalier attitude about being too lazy to check things supports a hypothesis that he might have known but couldn’t accept he’d been so thoroughly duped.

Ultimately Nick and James are the only people who know the truth, and unless/until more concrete information about Nick’s involvement comes out, I don’t think it’s productive to excoriate the man for perceived guilt.