Advance-Fee Scams: A Corpus and Genre Analysis

Online scamming is on the increase at a global level. Its chances for success depend, to a large extent, on the ability of the scammers to advantageously exploit a knowledge asymmetry between themselves and their victims. Advance-fee frauds seem to achieve their purpose because the victims ignore the warning signals present in these communications. This paper analyzes a corpus of scam emails to identify the language used to manipulate the victims to the extent that they fail to acknowledge the indicators which clearly point to a fraud. For this purpose, the analysis is based on the notion of promotional
letter move structure (Bhatia 1993), the semi-formal representation of knowledge involved in fraud detection and prevention (Gao & Zao 2005), the model of judgment and choice according to preferences and attitudes (Kahneman 2003), as well as the persuasion strategies presented by Fischer et al. (2013). The results indicate that this genre is a variation of a sales promotion letter which offers greed as an incentive and generates credibility by referring to actual facts.