Forensic Linguistic Analysis of Selected Cybercrime Complaint Texts in Lagos State

Forensic linguistics applies linguistic analysis to legal and investigative contexts, and the growing volume of cybercrime in Nigeria creates an urgent need for linguistically-informed tools for analyzing fraudulent communication. This study applies forensic linguistic methods to a corpus of cybercrime complaint texts submitted to the Lagos State Police Command Cybercrime Unit between 2022 and 2024, focusing on the linguistic features that characterize fraudulent communication in advance fee fraud, romance scam, and phishing categories. A sample of sixty anonymized complaint texts, twenty from each fraud category, was assembled with the cooperation of the cybercrime unit, and the embedded fraudulent communications they document were subjected to idiolect analysis, register analysis, and deception cue analysis. Findings reveal category-specific linguistic profiles: advance fee fraud texts show formal bureaucratic register combined with urgency-creating modal verb clusters, romance scam texts deploy high solidarity-seeking positive politeness strategies with emotional register escalation, and phishing texts mimic institutional register with identifiable lexical and syntactic deviations from genuine institutional communication. Cross-category features include conditional construction density and first-person plural pronoun use to create false social inclusion. The study argues that these linguistic profiles could inform investigative screening tools for cybercrime units and recommends the establishment of a forensic linguistics consultation service within the Lagos State cybercrime investigative infrastructure. Keywords: forensic linguistics, cybercrime, fraud communication, Lagos State, linguistic profiling.