P.s. If you bought the wallet.dat, you got scammed.
I must admit, I usually suspect this is the case whenever I see one of these threads. Most of these threads are full of weird excuses as to why the password or the wallet file were lost. The stories often don't make sense, and come off as lies. I'm not saying this is the case in this particular scenario, but it fits the trend.
Anecdotally, there seems to be a lot of evidence to support this theory. How many early adopters lost their wallet files, or their passwords, and how many are technically incapable of resolving those issues themselves? And why haven't they tried to access those files sooner?
I don't know, maybe I'm being overly skeptical, but something doesn't add up considering the quantity of these types of threads.