promised a large share, typically ten to fifty percent, in return for assisting the fraudster to retrieve or expatriate the money. Although the vast majority of recipients do not respond to these emails, a small percentage do, enough to make the scam worthwhile as many millions of messages can be sent daily. To help persuade the victim to agree to the deal, the scammer often sends one or more false documents that bear official government stamps, and seals. 419 scammers often mention false addresses and use photographs taken from the Internet or from magazines to falsely represent themselves. Often, a photograph used by a scammer is not a picture of any person involved in the scheme. Multiple "people" may write or be involved in schemes as they continue, but they are often fictitious; in many cases, one person controls all the fictitious personae used in scams. Once the victim's confidence has been gained, the scammer then introduces a delay or monetary hurdle that prevents the deal from occurring as planned, such as "To transmit the money, we need to bribe a bank official. Could you help us with a loan?" or "For you to be a party to the transaction, you must have holdings at a Nigerian bank of $100,000 or more" or similar. This is the money being stolen from the victim; the victim willingly transfers the money, usually through some irreversible channel such as a wire transfer, and the scammer receives and pockets it. Often but not always, delays and additional costs are added by the fraudster, always keeping the promise of an imminent large transfer alive, convincing the victim that the money the victim is currently paying would be covered several times over by the payoff. The implication that these payments will be used for white-collar crime, such as bribery, and even that the money they are being promised is being stolen from a government or royal/wealthy family, often prevents the victim from telling others about the "transaction", as it would involve admitting that they intended to be complicit in an international crime. Sometimes psychological pressure is added by claiming that the scammers' side, to pay certain fees, had to sell belongings and mortgage a house or by comparing the salary scale and living conditions in their country to those in the West. Much of the time, however, the needed psychological pressure is self-applied: once the victims