The traits that characterize scammers are more or less known and often mentioned on such sites, in sections dealing with how to avoid such people, but it doesn't harm to mention them. Usually they are requests to contact them elsewhere or asking you to give them a mail or skype address without giving you any reason for doing so, being from a different country then the one they live, asking a lot of questions but avoiding answering any at all or doing it by using stereotypical ways of expression, and ultimately asking for money or other favors. The issue is of course to detect such signs long before the conversation goes to money.
On an other such site I am a member, a couple of months ago I received a message from somebody in a neighbouring country, it was a rather short message where she asked me to contact her at some non BDSM-related social networking app. There are perfectly reasonable and legitimate reasons for somebody to ask you to contact him/her somewhere else, but she gave me none, and I refused saying that whatever was to be said could be said there without any problem. Then she told me that the particular site plus many others of similar content was blocked in this country and she had to use VPN in order to access it. I checked it and found out that this was true, so in order to make things easier for her I gave her an alias mail address in order for her to be able to contact me, which she did. I replied to her mail, received no reply and when a few days later I sent another message in order to ask her something that I had thought about in the meantime I received no reply either. I waited for some time and then, having concluded that she was ghosting me, deleted the alias address I had given her and blocked her at the site she had first contacted me.
Scamming and ghosting are obviously not two identical activities, the motives for the first are purely criminal, but where there is common ground is the utter indifference for other people. The scammer is interested in others only as long as he/she gets or thinks that can get something out of them (money usually), while the ghoster doesn't have the will to find time in order try to understand others and also give time to others to understand him/her. The particular example I brought up, had a fully reasonable reason for wanting me to contact her somewhere else, but didn't bother to explain that in the first message.
Based also on various posts on this site and elsewhere, a lot of people seem to take ghosting very emotionally, there is one really nasty aspect to it, that if somebody disappears without a trace, you can't be certain if his/her silence is ghosting or has actually to do with something else which might have happened to this person. It is however such a common phenomenon nowadays that when somebody disappears like that the best is to wait for a while in case something has indeed happened before assuming that ghosting is taking place, and when such an assumption is made erase every way this person has to contact you again, because one thing is certain, the person who ghosted you once, will ghost you twice, so better not waste any more time. Therefore somebody must always be ready to block such people, and particularly if using email for communication, to have available a list of alias addresses and give only some of them and never the main one.
