Genre, Narrative and the "Nigerian Letter" in Electronic Mail
Abstract
Spam, or unsolicited email, has become an unavoidable fact of life for anyone with an email account. Spam emails generally reflect genres seen in traditional print format such as advertisements, memos, etc. One particularly interesting form of spam is the "Nigerian letter". Nigerian letters offer "get rich quick" schemes to engage recipients into advance fee fraud activities. This paper provides an empirical analysis of 111 Nigerian letters received by email to explore key elements including the use of form, purpose, and tone. We propose that the use of rich narrative appeals to strong emotions like greed, guilt and lust, and invokes archetypal myths of windfall fortunes in an effort to illicit behaviors which, for the most part, are counter-factual
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Through a fictitious Internet profile, the scammer develops a romantic relationship with the victim for 6-8 months, building a deep emotional bond to extort economic resources in a manipulative dynamic.
“Through a fictitious Internet profile, the scammer develops a romantic relationship with the victim for 6-8 months, building a deep emotional bond to extort economic resources in a manipulative dynamic.”
From Online Romance Scams: Relational Dynamics and Psychological Characteristics of the Victims and Scammers. A Scoping Review (2020) · cites this paper as [16]
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- Authors
- Cukier, W., Nesselroth, E., & Cody, S.
- Affiliations
- Toronto Metropolitan University (CA)
- ORCID
- Cukier, Wendy
- Venue
- 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2007
- Pages
- 70-70
- ISSN
- 1530-1605 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2122303692
- Cited by
- 35
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 2 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 5
- FWCI
- 0.73
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Linguistics and Discourse Analysis
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies
- Keywords
- spam, advance fee fraud, genre analysis, emotional appeal, mythological archetypes, counterfactual reasoning, persuasion
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