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“Congratulations, Your Email Account Has Won You €1,000,000”: Analyzing the Discourse Structures of Scam Emails

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The Palgrave Handbook of Deceptive Communication

Abstract

This chapter examines the various types, sources, textual features, and discourse structures of scam emails. Scam emails, like other forms of phishing, are a form of email-based deception where the phisher pretends to solicit a business partnership or announce a lottery winning in order to steal sensitive security information from the receiver of the email. This chapter also provides an overview of current literature and methods that have been applied to the study of phishing and email scams. The discourse structures that are analyzed include the textual and narrative constructions of the emails. The chapter concludes that scam emails are a function of global economic challenges that tend to promote unethical and fraudulent practices on the Internet.

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Correspondence to Innocent Chiluwa .

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Chiluwa, I. (2019). “Congratulations, Your Email Account Has Won You €1,000,000”: Analyzing the Discourse Structures of Scam Emails. In: Docan-Morgan, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Deceptive Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96334-1_46

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