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Lovextortion: Persuasion strategies in romance cybercrime

Anesa, Patrizia (2020) — Discourse, Context & Media

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DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2020.100398 (opens in a new tab)

Type:   Journal Article
Country:   Global
Tags:   Discourse Analysis, Fraud Detection, Lovextortion, Persuasion Strategies, Romance Cybercrime, Romance Scams, Social Engineering, Victim Awareness
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Synopsis

            
This publication analyzes online romance scams, focusing on how persuaders cultivate trust and elicit financial compliance from victims. The study uses a corpus of authentic English-language messages and template texts from romance scam operations to identify the structural stages of adversarial persuasion, drawing on existing models of scammers’ techniques and on the Elaboration Likelihood Model. It frames romance fraud as a form of cybercrime that blends emotional manipulation with strategic discursive devices, and it distinguishes a subset of “lovextortion” where a fake romantic bond leads to monetary demands rather than explicit blackmail. Methodologically, the author assembles two subcorpora: real exchanges between victims and scammers and a set of scam templates from a convicted online fraudster. Through qualitative analysis, the work maps recurring phases (initial contact, courtship, testing the water, and requests for money, with an optional sextortion dimension) and catalogs persuasive tactics such as appeals to trust and authority, visceral triggers, personalization through self-disclosure, and behavior designed to evoke similarity and commitment. The analysis emphasizes how listeners’ cognitive and motivational errors—illusions, overgeneralizations, and consistency pressures—are exploited to reduce critical evaluation and sustain compliance with increasing requests. The paper discusses practical implications for awareness, education, and policy: developing end-user guidelines, improving detection tools, and preserving the public’s ability to recognize deceptive patterns on dating and social platforms. It notes limitations related to corpus size and language scope, and it advocates expanding the dataset and refining models to support proactive scam detection and victim support. The author calls for applying these insights to broader anti-fraud efforts and user education.

          

        
                  

            
Identified Gaps

            
The paper identifies a need for continuing, multidisciplinary research because romance-scam texts and technological tools are becoming more sophisticated. It notes that the global linguistic and discursive study of online romance scams should be expanded, particularly through larger datasets and comparison of Anglophone and Francophone scam trends. It also identifies a practical gap in prevention: existing assistance services focus mainly on profile verification rather than linguistic indicators of fraud.

          

        
                  

            
Methods

            
Exploratory qualitative discourse analysis of an English-language corpus of romance-scam communications. The corpus comprised 26 authentic sets of online exchanges and 43 scammer template messages collected from 2010 to 2018. The study identified macro-structural stages of scams and analyzed psycholinguistic and discursive persuasive devices, drawing on established persuasion and scam-process models. It proposed an online romance-scam model based on recurring patterns in the corpus.

          

        
                  

            
Limitations

            
The corpus was small and limited exclusively to the Anglophone trend of romance scams, selected partly because of material availability and analytical consistency. The proposed model was not intended to exhaustively represent all complex scam interactions. The study was exploratory and qualitative, so its findings require verification with supplementary datasets and broader linguistic and cultural coverage.

          

        
                  

            
Future Work

            
Expand the romance-scam corpus, refine the online romance-scam model, and identify additional psycholinguistic features associated with compliance. Compare Anglophone and Francophone scam data to examine linguistic and cultural similarities and differences. Develop and evaluate linguistic and discursive detection tools, alongside public-institution awareness campaigns, platform-distributed guidance, and victim support.

          

              

    
    

        
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