Millions of Canadians use Internet-dating sites to look for love. Some find their mates, some find disappointment. And some find something far more dangerous - con artists and sex predators lurking in the shadows of cyberspace.

Last year, Liz Cole emerged from a nasty divorce and sought companionship online. It didn't take long to find her first suitor. His name was John Hill.

Hill said all the right things to Cole. And within weeks of their first Internet exchange, Hill proposed marriage. On the night before their engagement party, he asked Cole for a $1,200 down payment on a car. Cole told Hill that she didn't have that kind of money.

The next day, Hill didn't show up to their engagement party, leaving Cole and her daughters confused and distraught. Cole started to suspect that everything Hill had told her was a lie.

"You may not recognize it, but you know you're being victimized on some level - and I knew it."

What Cole didn't know yet was that Hill had a criminal history stretching back almost thirty years. He had multiple convictions for theft, fraud and assault.

While an online predator like John Hill strikes at the heart or the pocketbook, some strike to maim. One of the worst is Kolten Mastronardi.

From 1999 to 2005, Mastronardi met women on Internet-dating sites. He's been convicted in Ontario and British Columbia, of theft, extortion, assault and sexual assault, involving more than a dozen women he met online.

One woman was forced to have tattooed on her stomach, "Property of Kolten Mastronardi." Mastronardi told another woman that family tradition insisted that he strike her twenty times while she was stripped naked and tied down.

Mastronardi is now behind bars. The Crown Attorney has applied to have him declared a dangerous offender.

But Kolten Mastronardi and John Hill are not the only criminals cruising online dating sites. True.com is a Texas-based online dating company that conducts background screenings to keep criminals off its website. True.com says that it's turned away 35,000 people this year alone.

In the U.S., politicians like Florida's Rep. Kevin Ambler are pushing Internet-dating companies to post prominent warnings about online risks.

"You have people that are wearing their heart on their sleeves - they reveal all kinds of personal details about themselves," says Ambler. "This becomes a playground for predators to go in there and be able to mine that data."

Ambler's proposed law is being fought by the Internet-dating industry. But while Americans are at least debating legislation - in Canada, neither Ottawa nor the provinces are doing anything to pressure Internet-dating companies to increase their level of safety.

Which means there's no protection for those who're surfing for love from the likes of John Hill or Kolten Mastronardi.