Analysis of Practs and Allopracts in Typical Email Scams

Abstract

Email scams continue to pose a significant threat to cyber security by exploiting users’ trust through deceptive communication that imitates legitimate institutional messages. While prior research has predominantly focused on technical defences and psychological manipulation, there is a notable gap in understanding the pragmatic mechanisms scammers use to craft persuasive and deceptive emails. This study addresses this gap by applying Jacob Mey’s Pragmatic Act theory to analyse the pragmatic acts (practs) and their linguistic variations (allopracts) commonly employed in email scams. Through qualitative discourse analysis of a diverse corpus of phishing messages, this research identifies how scammers strategically deploy practs such as warnings, requests, and promises within socially recognised communication patterns -pragmemes to increase message credibility and pressure recipients into compliance. The objectives are threefold: to categorise the common practs and allopracts in typical email scams, to examine how these acts replicate trusted institutional and social pragmemes, and to assess how raising awareness of these pragmatic strategies can enhance users’ ability to detect email scam (phishing) attempts. The findings demonstrate that email scams systematically manipulate pragmatic norms to appear authentic, revealing the essential role of pragmatic competence in recognising and resisting such threats. This study contributes a novel linguistic perspective to email scams research and offers practical implications for cyber security education, suggesting that enhancing pragmatic awareness among users can improve their defences against email scam (phishing) attacks and strengthen overall cyber resilience.