June 2020Discourse Context & Media 35(2):100398
DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2020.100398
Patrizia Anesa
Abstract: "Online romance scams represent a growing global phenomenon. This study investigates a corpus of authentic messages of this type written in English, focusing on their structural, discursive, and linguistic features. The analysis shows that errors of judgment are exploited by scammers in order to lead victims to an inability to recognize an attempted fraud, despite the signs present in the message. The data obtained may contribute to the development and production of guidelines to be circulated widely, especially on sensitive sites online (e.g. dating sites), to help end-users to become more knowledgeable about adversarial fraudulent strategies."
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