Linguistic manipulation in telephone scam conversations: how are discourse strategies used to control victims?

Abstract Telephone scammers achieve their purpose through live voice conversations to acquire sensitive information and defraud victims of their money as the eventual outcome. While much research has been conducted to deconstruct the nature of scams of various types, the telephone scam has not been given due attention, particularly through the lens of language in the exercise of control over victims. This study investigated how telephone scammers manipulate victims through linguistic means. Additionally, as control strategies are affected by the type of response from targets, patterns of scammer strategies associated with “convinced” and “unconvinced” targets were investigated. Discourse strategies executed by scammers in recorded telephone scam conversations in China were analysed to reveal how scammers achieve control over their targets. The strategies realizing larger actions of legitimation, cooperation, defensive and offensive tactics were found to vary according to the relative success of the scam interaction. The study contextualizes the telephone call from an unknown caller as a liminal space that lends itself to the occurrence of criminal activities, highlights the strategic use of language as a powerful tool to manipulate targets through the framing of discourse within an institutional structure, both of a legal-authoritative institution and that of polite society leveraging on the protection of “face”. The findings enhance understanding of linguistic manipulation in telephone scams that could inform the development of public awareness programs for crime prevention.