Deceiving the Deceived: An analysis of the United Nations Compensation Scam

Abstract

The world today is full of deception by fellowman that can go on deceiving the other neither feeling guilt for the act nor sympathy for the victim. Even the “already deceived” can be lured in another trap in the name of compensation. This research wanted to expose the linguistic and nonlinguistic characteristics of the United Nations Compensation Scam which is one of the World Fund Recovery scam. It is a scam which is meant to deceive the scam victims in the name of compensation by the so-called United Nations organization. The research used a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) method, a research tool that views language usage as a social practice activity in society, to analyze a randomly selected scam vignettes extracted from the scam data base. CDA seeks to understand the intention of the communicator through linguistic and nonlinguistic means as well as the possible impact of the communication to the receiver. The three phased Fairclough’s Model and Analytical Framework (1995), that is, text analysis (description), processing analysis (interpretation) and social analysis (explanation) was used. Findings revealed errors of all kinds including: Redundant sentences, wrong spellings, wrong words, poor punctuation, wrong plurals and wrong capitalization as United Nations Compensation Scam linguistic features while exaggeration, persuasive and flattering language, raising of false hopes and false chains being nonlinguistic features of a scam.

Keywords: scam; deception; linguistic features; non-linguistic features