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Abstract

In this essay, I employ qualitative discourse analysis of eleven purposively selected literature to examine how “Nigerian scam” became an established yet detached signifier of advance-fee fraud in global discourse. I do not treat this association as a reflection of offender identity or national inclination. Instead, the analysis traces how attribution is produced through representational repetition, institu tional uptake, and the circulation of familiar narrative cues. Using qualitative discourse analysis and an interpretive approach, this paper distinguishes among the socio-technical conditions that enable fraud, the institutional processes that stabilize attribution, and the semiotic dynamics through which national categories acquire durability. In this essay, I also argue that the ‘Nigerian scam’ label persists not because it maps neatly onto empirical authorship, but because it has become a dominant interpretive frame that organiz es how fraud is recognized and acted upon. My analysis reveals that the label persists not because it accurately maps onto a specific offender identity but because it has been institutionally reproduced to the point where it becomes self-evident and operationalized to organize how fraud is recognized, investigated, and narrated even as the empirical landscape of fraud has become transnational and mediated by artificial intelligence (AI)The emergence of Generative AI further exposes this dynamic by eroding stylistic cues that once depended on attribution thus revealing how dependent the category has always been on interpretation rather than stable evidentiary markers.

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