LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE “NIGERIAN LETTER”

The article examines the systemic features of the subgenre of “chain letters” – “Advance-fee scam”, which meets the criteria of anonymity, surprise and manipulativeness. The nomination “Advance-fee scam” was fixed for this type of letter thanks to their authors, financial scammers offering the recipients of letters fraudulent financial transactions with the aim of subsequently extorting money. The work revealed that the senders of the advance-fee scam are identified based on the similarity of general features, characteristics and behavior patterns, as a result of which they can be attributed to typified individuals. In the course of the research, the conceptual, figurative and value characteristics of the “financial scammer” type are highlighted. At the conceptual level, the lexeme “scammer” has a rich synonymic range, characterized by expressiveness and negative connotations. The figurative characteristic is determined by the type of male or female at the age of 30 years old. To determine the value attributes of the typed identity of the fraudster, a survey was carried out, which made it possible to identify the attitude of the carriers of today's linguistic culture to the linguistic personality of the financial scammer studied in the article. In addition, the article notes that the main strategy of fraudsters determines their communicative behavior, in which a series of different verbal means are used to achieve the goal - to obtain material benefits through deception. The material of the study was a collection of authentic chain letters in Russian, English and French, received by the authors in the period from May 2020.