Thanks to the anonymity that it affords, the internet offers fertile ground for a whole range of deceptive practices, which involve various kinds of verbal and multimodal message deception, very often starting with identity deception ( Dynel, 2016). The last two decades have seen an influx of research in psychology and communication studies on online/digital deception, that is, deception performed on the internet (e.g., Hancock, 2007 Hancock et al., 2008 Toma et al., 2019 Whitty & Joinson, 2008). Furthermore, on a general plane, this study indicates a potential shift in the emic understanding of the concept of “scambaiting” from a punitive measure and an educational instrument to a creative practice geared toward posters’ kudos and users’ joint humorous experience through “baitertainment” and “scamusement.” Our significant finding is that posts such as those at r/scambait should never be taken at face value due to their inherent epistemological ambiguity, to which the users choose to remain oblivious or indifferent.
In both cases, scammer-victims are disparaged for being immensely gullible or downright stupid and Redditors earn online plaudits for submitting the most upvoted posts. Scammers’ deceptive strategies are depicted as amusingly naïve and inefficient, while scambaiters’ deceptive messages targeted at scammers demonstrate great creativity and wittiness. The analysis reveals that the r/scambait subreddit exists as a site of humorous entertainment arising from various forms of deception. Drawing on a representative corpus viewed through grounded theory, we establish the basic categories of posts and then unpack those further to reveal the deceptive practices being undertaken by both scammers and scambaiters, as well as Redditors’ untruthfulness in their fabricated posts. With a focus on the online phenomena of scamming and scambaiting, this article explores users’ communicative activities on Reddit’s r/scambait subreddit.
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