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A short while back, I wrote an answer on Quora, the Q&A site, about how to spot romance scammers, the sourge of the internet.

Briefly: Romance scammers are people, almost always men, from places like Nigeria, Ghana, the Philippines, and Myanmar, who use stolen photos to pretend to be hot women or handsome men in order to trick lonely people out of money. They strike up a conversation, pretend to “fall in love,” and then comes an endless series of asks for money: I need money to buy a plane ticket to come see you, darling. Oh no, I was in a car crash, I need money for hospital bills. I’m on an oil rig and I can’t access my bank account, I need money, I swear I’ll pay you back when my rotation ends. I need money for my sick kid. I need money for a new computer. Money money money.

It’s big business. These scammers work in HKs (Hustle Kingdoms), large organized crime gangs that specialize in extracting money from the gullible and the lonely. A single romance scammer typically has 50-60 “mugus” (a Nigerian slang term for “fools”) on the hook at any one time, and can make hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year.

In the past, these scammers targeted mainly women, pretending to be Army generals or oil rig workers or doctors working in distant war-torn countries. Today they pretend to be hot women, and target men, because, they say, men are easier to fool. They’re all over social media, using stolen photos of models and porn stars, talking about how much they hate being single, putting come-ons in their profiles.

So, here we go: a guide to spotting scammers. Most of the examples here are on Quora, but the same applies to other social media sites.