What I want to know is what everyone else does about the scam artists found on dating sites. In the last month I have been contacted by at least 10 of them. Most are easy to spot since their messages are filled with broken English. The problem is with 2 of them I was duped for a little while. Their English was close to perfect, at least no worse than mine, and they seemed to say all of the right things. I only got wind of them being scammers is when they asked for money. The one that strung me along for almost a week, we had written multiple messages to each other, said he was an engineer stuck in Nigeria and that he needed $1000 for a hospital visit for his son.

I of course reported the offending profiles to the dating site which promptly removed them but in the end I had wasted my valuable time with these scammers. How can we combat this problem which seems to be plaguing sites these days?

So we can better protect ourselves by knowing the type of scams that they run, what other stories have scammers tried on dating sites and how did you spot them?

As soon they say they are in Africa be suspicious.