Spotting scammers is getting harder – but there are still ways to ensure you stay safe, Brooks says.

Q: Is there an easy way to spot scammers from ‘normal’ daters? If scammers have made it onto a dating site, its because the profile looks normal. If they want you to get off the dating site asap – and communicate by email, say – that’s a sign. Older women, because its tough to find a hot older gentleman. Bear in mind that its the scammers job to get users off the site asap.

Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch works with many online dating sites – and says that all of them are plagued by fake profiles, scammers and criminals looking for money, not love.

Millions are lost to these scammers each year – and worse still, the crime may be underestimated, as victims are often too distraught to reveal the extent of their losses.

Even if they’ve been taken for tens of thousands of dollars.

They’re not going to get satisfaction legally or financially.

Earlier this year I tried my hand at email marketing here at Discover Org. After all, you’re just dropping some buzzwords into a few compelling sentences, right? Not only was writing a good, short, email message to prospects difficult – it felt familiar. You may not immediately connect the dots between agonizing over email language and choosing which witty line to use on Tinder.

Where had I felt this severe frustration in writing a really convincing AND brief message? Well, unless you’ve spent way too much time doing both of these things (like me). My colleague, Steve Waters, penned an article last year on, “How Prospecting is Like Online Dating: 5 Mistakes Online Daters Can Teach Salespeople.” As a sales guy, Steve talks about getting on the phone, listening, and sharing.

Online dating takes a different attitude and skill-set than, say, making cold approaches at a bar or flirting with someone you met at a house party.Let’s be honest though, people don’t talk on the phone anymore when they’re dating. Everything comes down to the ability to endear yourself to someone through something downloaded off the App Store ten minutes ago.For that reason, I’m going to narrow Steve’s topic even further and highlight eight key reasons why email marketing is exactly like using a dating app.“Since our whole world is so instant now, people can craft entire personas through their slew of texts . “I met a guy briefly at an event, and we started texting.He was witty, smart and more flirty than he was at the party.If you’re not personalizing your emails and putting the effort into making them catch the recipient’s eye, then you’ll probably fare no better than those firing off two-word intros on dating apps. ” will always yield more and better responses whether you’re trying to get a date or a response to an email.Anyone who’s downloaded a dating app has gotten the vanilla “Hey” or “What’s up? These types of messages exhibit zero originality and communicate absolutely nothing about the sender. When you’re sending marketing emails, there’s other people vying for the business of your prospects too. They’re free to send as many messages as they want and technology has made it easier to reach prospects.Eventually, he sent her some Snapchat selfies of his face, and asked her to return the gesture — all before they’d even gone out! These days, it’s hardly unusual for guys and girls to engage in epic pre-first-date texting sessions.In a July study titled “Mobile’s Impact on Dating and Relationships” commissioned by online dating sites JDate and Christian Mingle, more than 60 percent of single people said they communicate more frequently with potential dates because of their phones.When we meet somebody in person, we have hundreds of thousands of verbal and non-verbal clues to give us an intuitive grasp of who we’re talking to and whether or not we’re into them long before we go up and introduce ourselves.Everything from how they stand to how they talk, who they talk to, how they act around their friends, how they smell, even the pitch and timbre of their voice indicate whether or not we’re likely to have an initial attraction to them that would prompt us to make that all-important first approach.All dating sites have to suppress and deal with fraud. Q: If you are creating your own profile, is there anything that might make you a target? They’re looking for some sign of gullibility among people who are likely to have some savings. People who are generous, vulnerable, of-faith and fighting poor odds of finding a partner are ideal. In general I recommend people chat for a short while, and then jump onto a video date anyway. I don’t think anyone should put more than half an hour of time into communication without doing a video or real life date. They want to get into direct email or Skype or phone contact asap.So if your profile hints at any of those, you’re more of a target. Q: I’m already in a relationship online – can I be sure it’s for real? Some of these fake relationships can last for years. Q: My lover sends me gifts – surely that means he’s for real? They’ll send gifts, and make users feel beautiful and cared for, and then it them with a test. That way dating sites detection systems have less chance of picking up on unusual lines of communication.But experts say that even though it may seem like you’re getting to know the person better before your date, it’s actually a false sense of intimacy — and you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.“It’s a trend we’ve coined ‘premature escalation,’ ” explains Emily Morse, a sex and relationship expert and host of the “Sex With Emily” podcast on i Tunes. by the time you meet your partner for an actual date, you’ve built up this whole image and fantasy in your head of who you think they are, and then they turn out to be totally different.” That’s what happened to Kenny Thapoung, an editorial assistant from Bed-Stuy.