Sometimes you just have to get scammed to be able to recognize scams. Seems obvious to outsiders, but can be hard to see when you're in it.

Some favorites:

- No way they would actually screw me over! We're buds/they got me tiger balm/they paid some/I did them a solid

- Thin veneer of safe fallbacks that doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Legal or other 'repercussions'

- Endless delays and excuses (though it's usually too late by this point)

Yeah, a lot of it only becomes obvious in hindsight because each individual signal is easy to rationalize away