Virtual ethnography and spam: fraud and fear in deceptive narratives on the Internet

Abstract

With just couple of clicks, Internet users are able to send messages to several people at the same time in a fast, handy and cheap way. If we add the possibility of remaining anonymous, we are creating a wonderful scenario for spammers. The main aim of this paper is to present briefly how fear contributes to the construction of deception through the spam narratives. Our virtual ethnography suggests a parallelism between the re‐production of gender stereotypes in the new communication tools and the same stereotypes found in traditional fairytales, so we will focus on how fear, understood as a continuum, connects spam and fairytales, and how this parallelism and the gender stereotypes found in both kinds of texts can interact with the linguistic mechanisms used by spammers to make their stories believable. The corpus we have used for this research contains approximately 450 emails, between four and fifty‐two lines extension, written in English, Spanish and French, and received between late 2009 and mid‐2011. The structure usually consists of a presentation, a reason for the contact, a justification, a request or response data or a farewell. These emails are signed by men and women, but the real identity of individuals who send these mails or promote its delivery remains unknown. In this communication, we will present and analyze some of the most representative mails. Our analysis will be based in tools and concepts provided by Applied Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, without forgetting the gender perspective.