Cultural Phishing: The Emotional Inducement in Financial Scam in China

Financial fraud in contemporary China manifests as a sophisticated architecture of “cultural predation,” weaponizing victims’ collective emotions to ultimately exploit victims’ economic interests through affective-cultural manipulations. This study investigates the case of “China-Africa Mining Scam” to unveil how fraudsters engineer emotional dynamics via a temporal bricolage strategy—a set of actions arranging forms of scam materials into three inter-linked narratives to invoke victims’ emotional resonation to and thus willingly participation/stay in fraud campaigns. First, folk interpretations of economic ethics shape the risks and returns of stock market investments—particularly “stock dividends”—as “everyone gets a share” (人人有份), morally recasting individual greed into a legitimized collective entitlement under the political notion of “common prosperity” (共同富裕). Second, falsified iconography based on the fabricated “Belt and Road” certificates duplicating the State’s document formats and styles, which embodies a sense of security rooted in societal trust in the authority of the state. Third, familial collectivism fabricates pseudo-kinship bonds in digital spaces, with routinized morning greetings and virtual “shareholder clans”. These narratives contribute to cultivating the sense and desire of gain and entitlement, fabricating the sense of security and manufacturing the sense of belongings in the online scam campaign. Conceptualizing this symbiotic operation of “cultural resource appropriation → discursive ritualization → emotional inducement,” as a process of cultural phishing, the study contributes to theorizing online financial fraud from an affective-cultural perspective, thereby enriching the understandings of how financial frauds are operated and achieved in contemporary China.