You are absolutely right that many of these scammers follow the same pattern--basically they have a formula that works, so they stick with it. It's good that you are educating yourself. You can actually see many of the points about basic scammer profiles here:
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=3607 Posting each scammer's information-email address he is using, photos, first messages to you (some of the most likely to be recycled) can be a tremendous help to other potential victims.
But, just to clarify a few points.
I guess this is so they cannot be traced and when you click on them again the site tells you that they are not available.
Deleted dating site accounts has nothing to do with their traceability. Scammers know that their profiles, like their email addresses, are frequently short-lived. That's why many try to pull you off the dating site almost immediately. When a scammer sets up a new dating profile, he will typically approach as many targets as possible, as fast as possible--so you can be sure that he approached dozens of other women before or when he approached you. When the profile disappears, it is often because (a) one or more of the other women he targeted reported him for scamming or (b) on a paid dating site, he used a stolen credit card to sign up, and the site discovered the fraud. Unfortunately, standard policy on most dating sites is to simply delete the profile without warning the people contacted by the scammer. Occasionally, the scammer will delete the profile on his own to support his scam, but more often than not it was deleted.
They will e-mail, but don't do that too often either, as their IP address can be traced and that will tell you where they are e-mailing from.
IP addresses can be traced, but it is extremely easy to get around that and most experienced scammers are quite capable of disguising their location while using email. Some scammers do still stick with email. The primary reason so many do like chat is so they can accelerate the "relationship." The faster they can get the victim to believe she is in a real relationship with a future, the sooner they can get to the money request. And when she has spent hours on chat, the victim feels like she has invested much more and is that much more committed.
They steal their pictures from other people on the dating sites that they go on,
Sometimes. They also steal from facebook pages, modeling sites, sites for aspiring actors, and even news stories and wikipedia.
I was talking to two men at one time who had the same pictures. One was real and I could tell the difference.
I would be very careful about this one. While the English is frequently poor for scammers from Nigeria and Ghana, there are exceptions. And scammers from South Africa, while less common, often have excellent English. If one scammer is using the photos, it is highly likely there are other scammers using the same photos, and the odds of the second person with the same photos also being a scammer are much higher than average.
If you are researching scammers, I hope that you are not using dating site profiles or yahoo accounts that are linked to your real identity. That would not be playing safely. We have more information at our sister site, 419eater.com, on safety when baiting scammers.
It's also important to point out that while the approaches are often very similar, not every scammer is the same, and many scammers vary from the "norm" in one way or another. I want to reiterate this, because when given a set of criteria that defines a scammer, some victims will convince themselves that their "love" is real because he doesn't meet all of the criteria. The only thing we can say with certainty is that every scammer will ultimately get to the money, though it may take a while.
