Scammer Exchange: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This study explored the conversational discourse employed by online scammers through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), with the principal aim of elucidating how linguistic and stylistic features construct asymmetrical power relations and facilitate the victimization of individuals in digital environments. Drawing on Fairclough’s (2013) three-dimensional framework and van Dijk’s (2008) socio-cognitive approach to discourse and power, the study analyses authentic WhatsApp interactions collected via virtual ethnography. Virtual ethnography was selected to capture naturalistic discourse, using an ethical measure of a covert, responsiveparticipant role. This approach involves deception of human subjects, the absence of informed consent, potential emotional harm to participants (scammers), and the researcher’s own risk of vicarious trauma. These dilemmas were systematically addressed through institutional ethics review, strict harm-minimisation protocols, and ongoing psychological supervision, aligning the study with consequentialist justifications that prioritise public benefit in preventing widespread harm to future victims. Three pseudonymised case participants' discourses were analysed across three recurrent discursive strategies: constructing narratives of extreme urgency, performing accelerated declarations of love, and fabricating backgrounds of tragic isolation and bereavement. The findings reveal how specific linguistic features—high-modality vulnerability markers, exclusive-we pronouns, sequential emotional entrapment cycles, and deliberate omission of perceptual detail—systematically invert traditional power hierarchies, commodify empathy, and exploit global economic and cultural inequalities. In the unverifiable context of digital spaces, these features transform everyday language into a potent instrument of ideological domination and financial dispossession. By exposing micro-level linguistic mechanisms through which power and inequality are enacted in cyber fraud, the study contributes original insights to critical discourse studies, forensic linguistics, and digital criminology, while underscoring the urgent need for linguistically informed prevention strategies and policy interventions.