Modern Nigerian Scammer Slang Language

How Scammers Operate

A SCARS Insight

Scammers Are Known For Developing Their Own Slang, But It Has Gone From Just A Few Words To Almost A Language

As part of the strategies developed to ‘institutionalize’ scammers and their illicit business, and evade the punitive hand(s) of the Nigerian and international law enforcement agencies, cyber scammers in Nigeria have devised various strategies, including the deployment of anti-language and slangy expressions in their transactional and social interaction.

Studies on cybercrime in the Nigerian context have largely addressed the phenomenon from the sociological, economical and information technological perspectives with little attention paid to it from a linguistic perspective. Therefore, this study investigates the linguistic strategies employed by cyber scammers in Southwestern Nigeria in their social and transactional interaction.

Findings reveal slang coinages and overlexicalisation, and relexicalization (semantic extensions) are anti-language phenomena characterizing cyber scammers’ language in the region.

In other words, scammers are inventing their own language or terminology in their work and interpersonal or organizational relationships.

The full PDF of the study is below, but here are some of the important findings!

Types Of Cybercrimes In Nigeria

Nigeria’s cybercrimes include cloning of websites, false representations, Internet purchase and other e–commerce kinds of fraud.

The commonest forms of cybercrimes in Nigeria are financial fraud, cloning of electronic mails, identity theft (which often manifests or comes in form of emails emanating from impostors claiming to be representing certain financial institutions and requesting customers to supply certain sensitive information about their accounts to avoid their accounts being blocked, thus making transactions impossible) credit card theft, cyber harassment, fraudulent electronic mail, cyber laundering, malware, and cloning of websites.

Prevalent in Nigeria include:

• Yahoo attack, which involves the use of e-mail address-harvesting devices to obtain information about the prospective victim’s e-mail address(es) from the Internet access points, with the intention of sending such scam messages;
• hacking which has to do with the perpetrator breaking the security codes of financial institutions or organizations for e-commerce,
• funds point cards and e-marketing products sites;
• software piracy (illegal reproduction and distribution of software applications, games, and movies);
• malware dissemination,
• phishing (cloning of products and e-commerce sites/pages with the aim of defrauding unsuspecting victims);
• spoofing (the process of having a computer on a network to operate like another, usually one with exceptional access rights, so as to access information on the other systems on the network);
• cyber plagiarism (stealing other peoples’ ideas via the Internet public domains);
• cyberstalking (in which the fraudster does a follow-up on the unsuspecting victim by sharing emails and entering the chat rooms frequently with them);
• cyber defamation (in which the scam perpetrator sends e-mails containing defamatory contents to people related to the victim or posts such on a website);
• salami attack (a technique through which small amounts of assets are removed from a larger pool. The stolen assets are removed one slice at a time (Hassan et al, 2012, p. 627).

Of course, there is more, with romance scams and BEC scams having the highest priority and profitability.

Anti-language

What is this?

At certain times and places we come across special forms of language generated by some portion of a subset of society – kind of an anti-society; these we may call “anti-languages.” An anti-language serves to create and maintain social structure through conversation, just as an everyday language does; but the social structure is of a particular kind, in which certain elements are strongly foregrounded. This gives to the anti-language a special character in which metaphorical modes of expression are the norm; patterns of this kind appear at all levels, phonological, lexico grammatical, and semantic. The study of anti-languages offers further insights into the relation between language and social structure, and into the way in which text functions in the realization of social contexts
(Halliday, 1976: 1)

We provide this so that victims may be watchful for these terms in the course of their conversations with these criminals!