After looking at the scam messages on LMO and the two messages I found in my personal gmail account, I was definitely able to identify recurring themes. Many scam messages try to make the reader believe they have won a lottery reward that needs to be claimed. Other messages attempt to evoke the empathy of the reader by claiming family members have died or that they are fleeing political conflict. Another theme I noticed was that of a report of financial error, in which the scammer tries to make the reader think that they must urgently respond to the message or risk losing money from their bank accounts due to some bookkeeping error. Some of the countries that messages usually claimed to originate from were Sudan, Nigera, the United States, and even the United Nations. The monetary amounts at stake ranged from a few thousand dollars to several million dollars, although if the email asked the reader to pay an amount, it was usually a small amount in the order of $100.

To visualize this data, one potential idea would be to create an interactive online map of the Earth to show where scam message purport to originate from. Each nation would be shaded to represent how many scam messages ‘originated’ there. When a user clicks on a nation, a pop-up would appear displaying how the scam messages were distributed among themes and narratives.

Another idea could be to shoot photographs representing the situations depicted by these scam messages. For example, one could photograph a plighted elderly woman to demonstrate the emotions evoked by a scam message purportedly sent by a widow whose family has died. Perhaps the website displaying these photos could show the user these images, after which the user can choose to view the scam message it is based on.

I could definitely imagine a spam story generator. Such a generator could have a set of pre-defined templates available. Users would then have to fill in the blanks left in the story, which could be missing names, countries, bank names, addresses, or dollar amounts. By creating these messages, users may be able to better understand the tactics that scammers resort to in their deceptions.