Several years ago, I was involved in a long-distance relationship with a girl I’d met online. When I told an older German acquaintance of mine about her and how I had met her over the internet, he was utterly perplexed. He didn’t understand how you could meet someone in a virtual space and then create a real relationship with that person in the physical world. When I told him about the mechanisms of online dating — the creation of profiles, the seemingly endless scrolling through an infinite number of match possibilities, and the similarly endless procession of swiping left or right — he went from perplexed to downright disturbed. “What do you mean?” he asked, in his German-accented English. “What is this, an online Auschwitz? ‘You, to the left; you, to the right…’?”

Thankfully, no. But a whole host of scammers and predators do lurk in online dating sites, preying upon unsuspecting daters who are merely looking for a romantic connection. These scams are usually financial in nature — phishing schemes in which criminals attempt to pry sensitive personal information such as credit card and Social Security numbers from their victims — but some of these scams can have rather dire consequences. They can lead to enormous losses of money, crippling debt, and in some cases even death — or at least the contemplation of it.