All my single ladies...

Dear, sweet, single friends.

I'm so glad I'm done with the dating game. When I started out it was pretty simple. Man see woman. Woman see man. They talk, connect... grow old and have babies. With a couple of steps in between or reverse, who knows. The internet was just past the dot com boom, and never in a million years would I have gone date shopping on it.

(Mr. Lovinangels might tell a different story.)

Even with the whole face to face out in the open kind of dating, there was a certain safety net in being able to look someone in the eyes. You still have an 95 per cent chance of him being creepy beyond belief, but at least you can make a slightly more informed judgment.

So, fast forward ten years, and suddenly you can find any kind of date you want online. You can hook up for a night, a week, have an affair, get murdered on craigslist, whatever your pleasure..

Needless to say, dating scams are at an all time high.

The most recent, though, hurts my heart and makes my stomach sick.

The scammers are impersonating a US soldier. This is brought to you by the same people who send you the emails that say you won the lottery or had a long lost relative who left you more money than Bill Gates (you don't answer those, right??).

The scam goes something like this: Nice looking soldier scours dating site for lonely ladies, strikes up a conversation, plans a wedding, and gets the fiancee to pay for a plane ticket home.

Hold the phone.

A plane ticket home? Doesn't the us military usually at least return the soldier to the country of origin? I know I'm not looking through love struck eyes here, and lord knows, I've been duped a time or two, but I'd like to say I'd see through this one.

The crazy thing about it, (and probably why it works so well), is $1200 is not a huge amount of money for a long con. Which is probably why it works so well. No one is going to think somebody is going to spend six months working on them to make so little.

but honey, take it from Mama Angel. If the boy wants you to forward him money so he can meet you, take your computer and head to the local PD.

I'll never say I told you so.