Genre, Narrative and the "Nigerian Letter" in Electronic Mail

Spam, or unsolicited email, has become an unavoidable fact of life for anyone with an email account. Spam emails generally reflect genres seen in traditional print format such as advertisements, memos, etc. One particularly interesting form of spam is the "Nigerian letter". Nigerian letters offer "get rich quick" schemes to engage recipients into advance fee fraud activities. This paper provides an empirical analysis of 111 Nigerian letters received by email to explore key elements including the use of form, purpose, and tone. We propose that the use of rich narrative appeals to strong emotions like greed, guilt and lust, and invokes archetypal myths of windfall fortunes in an effort to illicit behaviors which, for the most part, are counter- factual.