Jan Blommaert. Making Millions: English indexicality and fraud

Blommaert, J. (2005) Making Millions: English indexicality and fraud. King's College London, accessed 08 March 2012 <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/ldc/publications/workingpapers/29.pdf>

In order for a spam message to be effective it must respect given linguistic, stylistic and generic criteria, affirms Jan Blommaert in his paper Making Millions: English indexicality and fraud. In his paper he argues that although spam authors are skillful within the real of global communication, as well aware of the general conventions of email messages, they struggle to produce a grammatically and orthographic correct messages (p.2).

Blommaert distinguishes a typology of four different kinds of emails: Dormant accounts in which the author poses as a banker or assurance officer who found unclaimed funds from a deceased client, and proposes a transaction to the addressee;

Lottery rewards announces the reader won the online lottery;

Rescue operation asks for the reader's assistance in transferring the capitals from the posing author to a foreign account, as the posing author find himself in trouble at his home country;

Charity emails written by a supposedly religious author, nearing his last days and wanting to give away his capital to charities. within in this typology Blommaert distinguish two sub-categories. The first consisting of Lottery rewards, these are marked by a formal and administrative language. The remaining three categories form what Blommaert entitles narratives of experience and trust. Despite this division, and the employment of different narratives, moral frames, Blommaert denotes the uniformity and stability of the messages within these categories, gathered in the context of this article (pp. 4-9).

"the patterns and procedure is identical: for unexplained reasons, I have been chosen as the preferred partner in a money transaction of considerable size and substance; I have to open a new bank account in which the money can be placed. And whatever the nature of the services I render to the authors of such messages, I shall be very generously rewarded." (p.7)

Blommaert exposes the generic blueprint of the corpus of gathered spam messages in the following fashion: i) Terms of address, where the posing writer salutes the reader.

ii) Apology and introduction, gives the reader an explanation for the contact on such secretive and personal matter through an impersonal channel as email, and reasons why has he been chosen to take part in such lucrative business.

iii) Micro-narrative about the origin of the money, elaborates on the money's origin, and why does the posing writer requires the readers cooperation. Some of these stories are related to recognizable contexts, such as recent wars, natural catastrophes, or accidents like plane crashes.

iv) Reassurances to convince the reader of the sincerity of the posing writer, and the secure nature of the operation.

v) Requests for confidentiality made to the reader, even if the proposition entails no risk.

vi) Closing formula. (pp. 11-18)

Blommaert affirms such blueprint allows for quite different forms to materialize into spam narratives (p.11).

Blommaert is also quite assertive on specificity of this type of text, not at all random text, but a "specific types of text ... text that carry the message across". Nonetheless the texts are not overtly argumentative but indexically argumentative. As a strategy to gain the reader's trust through "the deployment of generic and stylistic features that lock into existing, recognizable and presupposable indexical values", in other words, they are coherent in formal terms to their claimed provenance, such as a writer posing as a banker exhibit indexes that confirm his position (p.18).

Despite all these knowledge, spam authors tend struggle with literary skills. And the case gains more relevance in the context of spam, in which a text travels the globe, and is meant to be read by unknown and individuals, in which case "what counts as 'good language' in one place can easily become 'bad language in another". The unskillful use of English can easily reveal the message as a case of fraud, simply betraying the message's indexes of authenticity (pp.19-20). "[A] globally recognizable 'serious' letter ... at the lowest level of realization - the level where actual words, sentences and punctuation marks need to be organized into a text - the world system re-emerged in full glory" (p.23).