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, b...