Genre, Narrative and the "Nigerian Letter" in Electronic Mail

Abstract

Spam, or unsolicited email, has become an unavoidable fact of life for anyone with an email account. Spam emails generally reflect genres seen in traditional print format such as advertisements, memos, etc. One particularly interesting form of spam is the "Nigerian letter". Nigerian letters offer "get rich quick" schemes to engage recipients into advance fee fraud activities. This paper provides an empirical analysis of 111 Nigerian letters received by email to explore key elements including the use of form, purpose, and tone. We propose that the use of rich narrative appeals to strong emotions like greed, guilt and lust, and invokes archetypal myths of windfall fortunes in an effort to illicit behaviors which, for the most part, are counter-factual.

Gender identity and emotions in email spam

“…According to the authors, this spam genre uses rich narrative appeals to strong emotions like greed, guilt, lust and fear, and invokes archetypal myths of windfall fortunes in an effort to elicit behaviours which, for the most part, are counter-factual. Regarding narrative styles, it is difficult to find studies in which we can observe the way in which spam e-mails are structured and justified, except maybe for the work of Cukier, Nesselroth and Cody (2007) on "genre and narrative in Nigerian Letters".…”

Empirical Study of Email Security Threats and Countermeasures

“…The DDoS attacks through spam targets servers rather than clients [7]. Phishing attacks, password phishing, Nigerien fraud mails, social network based security threats target client data for financial gain [7,9]. The client based attacks target end users to collect sensitive data such as banking, information, passwords, etc., to commit financial crimes.…”

“…Nigerian fraud mail is one of the successful letter frauds over the Internet [9]. Fraud is one of the oldest ways of making living and used to be very popular in the western world.…”

“…As long as the victim does not raise alarming issues, the fraudster will be in touch with the victim. According to Wendy et al [9], Nigerian fraud mail is one of the major fraudulent activity against North American end users. Even though the Nigerian fraudsters are spread across the world, the North American region has the more active scammers [9].…”

“…According to Wendy et al [9], Nigerian fraud mail is one of the major fraudulent activity against North American end users. Even though the Nigerian fraudsters are spread across the world, the North American region has the more active scammers [9]. Since these types of scams are new to developing nations like India, Brazil and China the user awareness is lesser than developed nations and thereby the number of victims are more.…”