A Critical Analysis of Financial Fraud Spam in English in Terms of Persuasive Strategies: Personalization, Presupposition, and Lexical Choices

The term ‘spam’ addresses unsolicited emails sent in bulk; therefore, the term‘financial fraud spam’ refers to unwanted bulk emails in which different tricks and techniques areemployed to swindle money from the recipients. Estimates show that more than 80% of worldwideemail traffic in 2011 was spam. It should be noted that while the number of daily spam emails in2002 was 2.4 billion, this number rose to 200 billion spam emails in 2011. Considering theincurred cost of spam emails, finding effective ways for identifying spam emails may helpdecrease the cost to a great extent. It must be borne in mind that the generators of the financialfraud spam emails employ intricate persuasive strategies that make their stories believable to thereaders. In an attempt to unravel some of these persuasive strategies, the present paper focuses onthe use of presupposition, personalization, and lexical choice that are frequently used by thegenerators of the financial fraud spam emails. The results of the analysis showed that the abovementioned persuasive strategies were widely used in the text of financial fraud spam emails.Furthermore, the study demonstrated that persuasive lexical devices were used throughout thespam emails, including the email addresses. In terms of personalization and presupposition, thestudy showed that all parts of the spam emails, except the address section, were subjected to theuse of these persuasive strategies.