TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hiss, Florian
T1  - Fraud and fairy tales : storytelling and linguistic indexicals in scam e-mails
T2  - International journal of literary linguistics : IJLL
N2  - Most of us receive numerous spam e-mails, texts that in one or the other way try to convince us to engage in the transaction of enormous sums of money, promising enormous benefits. In reality, such scam e-mails are fraudulent attempts to swindle money from unsuspecting Internet users. Language, its social contexts, and the composition of texts play a crucial role in the scammers’ strategies to approach their victims. This article uncovers and discusses some of the linguistic strategies by which scammers try to shape a sense of identity and mutual relationship – in the face of virtual anonymity –, and to involve their readers personally. In their attempts to get the recipients involved, scammers combine cultural indexicals, interactional roles, and narrative strategies. The analysis distinguishes three different narrative strategies in scam e-mails: Based on first, second, and third person stories, scammers establish links with the recipients by combining fictional content with real-world contexts. Some of the narratives display quite elaborate and artful traits and involve prototypical functions of traditional fairy tales. Hereby they implicitly connect the story content with the interactional roles of e-mail communication.
KW  - Spam
KW  - e-mail scam
KW  - indexicality
KW  - narrative
KW  - interactional roles
KW  - identity
Y1  - 2015
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/48403
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-484033
SN  - 2194-5594
N1  - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
VL  - 4
IS  - 1
SP  - 1
EP  - 23
PB  - Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
CY  - Mainz, Germany
ER  -