The Language of Deceivers

Crowdfunding sites with recent explosive growth are equally attractive platforms for swindlers or scammers. Though the growing number of articles on crowdfunding scams indicate that the fraud threats are accelerating, there has been little knowledge on the scamming practices and patterns. The key contribution of this research is to discover the hidden clues in the text by exploring linguistic features to distinguish scam campaigns from non-scams. Our results indicate that by providing less information and writing more carefully (and less informally), scammers deliberately try to deceive people; (i) they use less number of words, verbs, and sentences in their campaign pages. (ii) scammers make less typographical errors, 4.5-4.7 times lower than non-scammers.(iii) Expressivity of scams is 2.6-8.5 times lower as well.