An avance fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain. Among the variations on this type of scam, are the Nigerian Letter (419 fraud, Nigerian scam or Nigerian money offer), the Spanish Prisoner, as well as Russian/Ukrainian scam (also extremely widespread, though far less popular than the latter). Both the so-called Russian and Nigerian scams stand for wholly dissimilar organised crime traditions, they therefore tend to use altogether different breeds of approaches.