What does an investor actually hold when they fund someone else's option fee for half the spread?

A scenario worth working through carefully, and a lesson either way. Say an operator someone has met twice at a local meetup asks for $15,000. He wants to take a lease option on a 4 bed in an inner ring suburb, strike $295,000, 36 month option, $15,000 fee. His plan is to sublet it above his lease payment for a while and then either exercise and refinance or sell the option to a retail buyer for whatever the spread is. He offers half of whatever the option produces, with the $15,000 back first. What can be seen. His lease payment to the owner would be $1,750. He thinks he can sublet at $2,300, so $550 a month before anything breaks. He says similar houses have gone for $315,000 to $325,000, so he is projecting $20,000 to $30,000 on the option. He has no money in it if the investor puts up the fee. What cannot be seen, and this is most of it. First, what secures the $15,000. The option is an asset, but it is his asset, in his name. If he stops answering the phone, what does the investor actually own? "We can put it in an LLC" is not an answer to that. Second, whether the owner's agreement even allows him to sublet or to assign the option. Nobody has seen the draft, and "the owner is cool about it" is not a clause. Third, whether handing money to someone for a share of profits on a deal the investor does not control is the kind of arrangement that has securities implications. That one needs a securities attorney and should not be guessed at here. Fourth, the exit assumes a retail buyer wants to pay $315k plus for a house they could just buy on the market. Why would they buy his option instead? The piece that should bother anyone most is that his downside is zero and the investor's is $15,000. He loses time. The investor loses the fee. Nothing in what he has described changes that. So the decision on the desk is whether there is a version of this worth doing, maybe funding it as a loan with the option collateralized and a much smaller upside share, or whether the right move is to pass and spend the next month reading option agreements until the near miss is fully understood.