Scammers’ Identities as Represented in Emails to Indonesian Journal Editors

Abstract

Numerous scam emails received by journal editors with various rhetorical techniques are considerable linguistic phenomena to examine. Certain rhetorical techniques provide information about the email senders' identity and ideology. Thus, this study employs the transitivity system of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistic and Chiluwa's discourse strategies to discover how scammers construe reality based on their identities and ideologies. The findings show that the highest number of data provide powerful relational discourses, whether the discourse is explicitly stated or implicitly inferred through the narrativity of the emails. Based on those findings, the represented identity of the scammers is understood to be ambiguous: whether the scammers have power or have learned to express power in their writing. The ambiguity, however, is proven ironic by the findings on the misapplication of Standard English writing, which also provides evidence that the scammers are most unlikely highly educated. Even though this study does not provide evidence of the real identity of the scammers, this study has provided confidence for the recipients to easily acknowledge that the scammers are the ones who have less power than the recipients do.