Discursive-manipulative strategies in scam emails and SMS: The Nigerian perspective.

Ajayi, Temitope Michael

Scam email otherwise known as hoax email ([25]) is defined as an unsolicited email sent to a receiver's inbox mostly found in the spam of the receiver. As evident in our sampled emails/SMS, there are numerous instances of the use of formulaic expressions by the senders of scam emails and messages to appeal to the positive face of recipients and ultimately manipulate them. Drawing samples from a corpus of 450 scam emails in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, [14] observe scam emails senders use the evocation of fear and "hurry up feelings" as manipulative strategies in their emails. Keywords: scam emails; SMS; manipulative strategies; Nigeria EN scam emails SMS manipulative strategies Nigeria 175 195 21 10/26/22 20220501 NES 220501 1 Introduction When I grow up, I want to be a cyber scammer A Nigerian child's confession Sometime in 2014, the video of a four-year old Nigerian boy was circulated on the social media.

DECEPTION; EMAIL; SWINDLERS & swindling; SOCIAL science research; VERBAL behavior; ENVIRONMENTAL ethics; FACE-to-face communication

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2022, Vol 18, Issue 1, p175

1895-6106

Academic Journal

10.1515/lpp-2022-0008