A Linguistic Analysis of Authorship Attribution in E-Commerce Scams’ Promotional Contents and Narratives

Abstract

The emergence of e-commerce or online shopping platform has opened-up multiple opportunities for business owners to multiply their earnings. At the same time, this enables consumers to shop conveniently compared to the traditional shopping method, especially during the Covid19 pandemic. In Malaysia, the development opens consumers to the novel threat of fraud and scams, especially on social media and other online shopping platforms such as Shopee, Lazada and Facebook Marketplace. Due to the alarming rise in scams worldwide and the elusive methods offenders use, law enforcement agencies have turned to public education and awareness programs to reduce the number of scam victims. Thus, this study aims to identify authors’ attributes in e-commerce scams’ promotional contents and narratives to examine the scammers’ persuasive strategies to deceive their victims. Specifically, the study intends to look at the linguistic features in authorship attribution, including lexical, syntactic, semantic, structural, and content-specific features of the corpus. Although linguistic analysis has never been used in cybersecurity, learning the language used by scammers could help researchers collect more comprehensive empirical data and educate the public about this common phenomenon.