“You are in Trouble!”: A Discursive Psychological Analysis of Threatening Language in Chinese Cellphone Fraud Interactions

Abstract

Currently cellphone fraudsters often use language to threaten and bully victims. From discursive psychological perspective, the present study applies conversation analysis to discuss fraudsters’ threatening language in Chinese cellphone fraud conversations. The authentic data are collected from Chinese media which report legal news or conduct public legal education on the battle against cellphone frauds. Results of the study show that: (1) cellphone fraudsters construct their false identities through information gap and information sharing in their turn-taking designs, which brings victims into the threatening fraud interactions; (2) fraudsters use such conversational skills in a threatening tone as repetition, interruption, higher pitch, louder speech and so on to trigger victims’ psychological panic; (3) fraudsters’ discursive practices are situated for the threatening actions based on prepared and designed scripts. The findings of the study are expected to provide references for preventing cellphone fraud and fighting against fraudsters’ threats and bullies.

A study on the discourse strategy of telecommunication fraud based on proximization theory

“…Current linguistic research on these linguistic strategies has been mainly carried out from two perspectives. Some scholars paid attention to detailed discursive analysis of the fraud discourse on a micro-level, such as the grammatical preference of communicative-oriented material processes and possessive pronouns in spamming e-mails (Anafo and Ngula, 2020), the prosodic skills in threatening fraudulent phone calls (Chen, 2020), and the conceptual metaphor of SCAMMING IS FISHING/ANGLING behind the pragmatic act of scam (Tseng, 2010). Meanwhile, fraud discourse has also been considered as a distinct genre, which has its own universal framework to enhance its linguistic skills (Carter, 2015) and special multivariate structures (Ye et al, 2019).…”

Towards Descriptive Adequacy of Cyberbullying: Interdisciplinary Studies on Features, Cases and Legislative Concerns of Cyberbullying

“…While Xu [ 46 ] shows interest in the civil dispute of a defamation case arising out of cyberbullying, Jinshi Chen is more concerned about criminal behaviors of cyberbullying. In his paper ‘Y ou are in trouble!’ A Discursive Psychological Analysis of Threatening Language in Chinese Cellphone Fraud Interactions , Chen [ 5 ] analyses 20 pieces of cellphone conversations in the authentic fraud cases from Chinese media (together with the use of Praat 6.1.13). From the discursive psychological perspective, Chen analyzes how cellphone fraudsters construct their fake identities (police officers, procurators, telecom staff or gang leaders) through information gap and information sharing in their turn-taking designs.…”