Discursive odds of a fraudulent scheme in cyberspace correspondence: A CDA approach

Looking through the lens of forensic pragmatics, this study aims to critically analyze a typical textual sample of cyber-fraud correspondence as addressed to a candidate email-user. As such, the virtual correspondence which is written by a seemingly legitimate sender seems to be authorized in its claims to the extent that even the Gmail spam-identifying system has not report it as devious. Due to the questionable subject of such virtual correspondence(s) (VC) or cyberspace correspondence(s) (CC) being issued, that is the claim of offering a huge winning bid to the addressee and the significance of identifying the authenticity of such abrupt proposals, it can be hypothesized that such a text consists of fraudulent claims and therefore is subject to forensic cyber-crime examination. As such, the present study plans to provide a discursive analysis of an authentic sample based on a CDA procedure itself based on Fairclough’s (۱۹۸۹) formula presented in his influential book titled ‘Language and Power’. There are two main questions this study has aimed to answer: ۱) How the text at hand lends itself to CDA analysis in terms of the main tenets of discursive manipulation proposed in Fairclough’s CDA formula? and ۲) What manipulative patterns might be detected in a discursive piece of email correspondence allegedly presumed to be fraudulent. The main findings of this study are: ۱) The lexical, sentential, and textual levels in the Fairclough’s CDA formula are applicable to the email-correspondence text at hand, though modified in accordance with the text’s discoursal specifications, ۲) The outcome of the CDA analysis of the cyberspace correspondence sample under study provided definitive clues to support the existence of manipulative intention(s) hidden in the text at hand, ۳) The results might be applied to similar pieces of discourse at different levels of lexical, sentential, and textual composition.