The Language of Love Fraud

This study applies Fillmore’s Frame Semantics and corpus linguistics to analyze love fraud. It demonstrates the stages of the event as well as the words and phrases used to activate each frame and cause the victim to love and trust the fraudster. The fraudster thus constructs a romantic relationship with the victim, solely through language. This relationship begins with friendship, progresses to ‘soulmateship’ and engagement, and finally ends in an online ‘marriage’. Since one word can activate an entire frame, it is the fraudster’s lexical choices that cause the victim to ignore the imperfectly written messages and blinds them to the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic errors in the texts.