• DOI:10.1177/1748048511432602
Corpus ID: 143777619

‘I’m Sister Maria. Please help me’: A lexical study of 4-1-9 international advance fee fraud email communications

@article{Onyebadi2012ImSM,
  title={‘I’m Sister Maria. Please help me’: A lexical study of 4-1-9 international advance fee fraud email communications},
  author={U. Onyebadi and Jiwoo Park},
  journal={International Communication Gazette},
  year={2012},
  volume={74},
  pages={181 - 199}
}

U. Onyebadi, Jiwoo Park

Published 2012

Political Science

International Communication Gazette

4-1-9 is a multi-billion-dollar international email scam that is believed to have originated from Nigeria. This study examines the framing of email communications used in this fraud and content-analyzes their lexical features. Findings indicate that the scammers used Realism as the main persuasive lexical characteristic in the messages, that is, language that suggests meeting tangible needs in people’s everyday lives. The scammers also framed their messages as ‘business’ proposals to disguise… CONTINUE READING

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