Apps like Tinder, with their colourful decks of faces, make us feel that online dating is just another form of shopping. We forget that it's not: when shopping for love or sex online, there's no knowing what you're walking away with.

The story, last week, of a man unburdened of $300,000 by a woman he met on Tinder illustrates this well - and offers a timely warning about the perils of letting lust cloud judgment in the digital age. Oil consultant Marcel Kooter, 57, won a legal battle to win back the vast sum from a married Bulgarian woman, 20 years his junior.

Having met Manuela Radeva online in 2017, he seems to have fallen into a kind of daze; mesmerised by saucy shots of her posing with fast cars. She could have made him believe anything, so it wasn't hard to get him to think she was an investment banker and that he ought to transfer $300,000 to her account for her to invest on his behalf. She even moved into his London flat. Mr Kooter was, in his lawyer's words, "blinded by attraction".

Too late, he realised that she wasn't what she seemed, and sued her after their nine-month relationship ended - when it emerged that Radeva had married another man weeks before they had met. The court last week ordered her to repay the money.