What actually separates a real findom dynamic from a scam? (Genuine question, not rhetorical)

I've been turning this over for a while and I don't think the internet's default answer -- "if it feels wrong it's a scam" -- actually holds up. Plenty of genuine dynamics involve exactly the kind of one-sided giving that, described flatly, sounds indistinguishable from a scam. So the feeling-based test doesn't really separate anything.

The distinctions I keep landing on are structural, not emotional:

Consent that's revisited, not just given once. A real dynamic has some ongoing channel where either side can slow down, check in, or stop -- not necessarily a safeword in the vanilla-kink sense, but some real mechanism. A scam has none, because the entire point is to prevent exactly that kind of pause.

The domme's interest in the paypig existing beyond the transfers. Not necessarily emotional intimacy, but some actual attention, personality, back-and-forth -- something that would be lost if the money stopped. In a scam, the moment the money stops, so does everything else, instantly, because there was never anything else.

Escalation that responds to the person, not a script. Real dynamics usually have some texture to how they intensify -- tied to what's actually happening between the two people. Scam scripts escalate on a timer, regardless of what the mark says or does, because they're optimized for extraction, not relationship.

What I'm less sure about: how much of this is actually verifiable from the paypig's side before something goes wrong, versus only visible in hindsight. If you've been on either side of this, genuinely curious what signals you actually used in real time -- not the ones that only make sense looking back.