Expressing (Un)certainty through Modal Verbs in Advance Fee Fraud Emails

Abstract

Advanced fee fraud is a common form of online financial scam on the Internet. Previous researchers have attempted a broad study of the nature and narrative features of this scam. The current study attempts a linguistic analysis of 200 samples of advanced fee scam emails and examines specifically how modal auxiliary verbs are used to express certainty or uncertainty in the scam. For instance, modal verbs are commonly used to direct, promise, threaten and even serve politeness functions in scam emails. Deontic modal verbs such as "will" is found to be the most frequent verb in the data and is manipulatively deployed at speaker-oriented level of discourse to express commitment on the part of the speaker and impose some obligation such as ensuring the interaction proposed in the letters remain secret. Findings from the study reveal that the manipulative use of modal verbs contributes to the success of the proposed scam.

Scammers’ Identities as Represented in Emails to Indonesian Journal Editors

“…One of the results shows that linguistically, fraud via email uses a lot of modal verbs intending to direct, promise, threaten, and even show the function of politeness. The use of modal verbs significantly contributed to the success of these scam emails [1]. Furthermore, the email sender tries to take a personal approach; therefore, the linguistic feature shows the choice of pronoun, namely first person singular [2].…”

“…With the development of linguistic discourse related to email scammers, empirical findings are still needed on how scammers show ideological representation in the content of their emails. So far, the existing research has only reviewed scammer emails sent to personal recipients [1][2][3]. As for institutional receiver addresses, it is still questionable whether there are differences in the typology of email content scammers.…”