have provided money toward the payoff, they feel they have a vested interest in seeing the "deal" through. Some victims even believe they can cheat the other party, and walk away with all the money instead of just the percentage they were promised. The essential fact in all advance-fee fraud operations is the promised money transfer to the victim never happens because the money does not exist. The perpetrators rely on the fact that, by the time the victim realizes this (often only after being confronted by a third party who has noticed the transactions or conversation and recognized the scam), the victim may have sent thousands of dollars of their own money. Sometimes thousands more that has been borrowed or stolen to the scammer via an untraceable and/or irreversible means such as wire transfer. The scammer disappears, and the victim is left on the hook for the money sent to the scammer. During the course of many schemes, scammers ask victims to supply bank account information. Usually this is a "test" devised by the scammer to gauge the victim's gullibility; the bank account information is not used directly by the scammer, because a fraudulent withdrawal from the account is more easily detected, reversed, and traced. Scammers instead usually request that payments be made using a wire transfer service like Western Union and MoneyGram. The reason given by the scammer usually relates to the speed at which the payment can be received and processed, allowing quick release of the supposed payoff. The real reason for using such money-sending services is that such wire transfers are irreversible and often untraceable. Further, these services are ideal because identification beyond knowledge of the details of the transaction is often not required, making receipt of such funds almost or entirely completely anonymous. However, bank account information obtained by scammers is sometimes sold in bulk to other fraudsters who wait a few months for the victim to repair the damage caused by the initial scam before raiding any accounts that the victim did not close. Telephone numbers used by scammers tend to come from burner phones. In Ivory Coast, a scammer may purchase an inexpensive mobile phone and a pre-paid SIM card without submitting any identifying information. If the scammers believe they are being traced, they discard their mobile phones and purchase new ones. The spam emails used in these scams are often sent from