Fighting Cybercrime through Linguistic Analysis

This chapter explores the phenomenon of cybercrime from a linguistic perspective. In particular, the case of romance scams is investigated to gain a better understanding of the language factors that may foster the success of the scamming process. The analysis shows that romance scams display an effective sequential structure and create an illusion of credibility, intimacy and urgency. Thus, a form of unwilling complicity with the fraudster is forced upon the victim by a dexterous orchestration of linguistic devices. More specifically, strategic lexical choices contribute to increasing involvement, and the artful combination of words and expressions pertaining to specific semantic domains—for example, love, secrecy, intimacy and money—leads the victims to comply with the scammers’ requests.