My advice is to only trade links with webmasters that you know are honest. And there are a dozen or maybe couple dozen of them (that I know of). Most link requests I get are deleted because I do not know who the webmaster is or it is obvious they are up to no good.
Try to attend as many industry conventions as possible. You will begin to meet the honest webmasters at the conventions (the dishonest ones usually do not show their faces).