Summary: How do you persuade a stranger to join a multi-billion dollar criminal scheme? Researchers say the answer lies in a deliberate linguistic playbook designed to manufacture trust and normalize wrongdoing.
A team of forensic linguists analyzed the world’s largest set of recorded conversations tied to illegal activity—the Enron transcripts—and identified a reproducible set of conversational moves traders used to build trust, coordinate market manipulation, and legitimize corrupt behavior across multiple organizations.
Key Facts
- The Enron corpus: Researchers studied thousands of recorded phone calls in which traders discussed ways to restrict energy supply and inflate market prices.
- Trust management focus: Enron traders devoted a larger proportion of their speech to managing trust than the external contacts they were manipulating.
- Defensive repairs: When trust was threatened, traders rarely apologized. Instead they used justifications and blame-shifting to keep illicit plans on track.
- Diagnostic potential: The framework is being explored for practical use against fraud—phishing, romance scams—and against online radicalization and extremist recruitment.
- Ideological networks: The same interactional patterns appear in extremist forums and ideological harm networks (for example, incel communities), helping experts understand how individuals are recruited into dangerous groups.
Source: University of Birmingham
New research reveals the conversational tactics energy traders used to foster collusion, deceive clients and regulators, and coordinate corruption that crossed organizational boundaries.
Forensic linguists at the University of Birmingham examined how trust is established, sustained, repaired, and weaponized in real time to secure ongoing collaboration. The analysis focused on the secretive phones calls that central actors used to arrange coordinated market moves—calls that were recorded and preserved as a unique corpus of criminal speech.
Published by Cambridge University Press and led by Dr. Matteo Fuoli, the study systematically coded speech acts in the Enron recordings and found that traders spent a disproportionate amount of speaking time on what the team calls “trust management.” This concentrated effort helped them secure cooperation from people in other companies and to influence access to energy infrastructure.
The research distilled the conversational tactics into five core “trust moves”: bond, build, confide, probe, and repair. These moves combined emotional rapport, strategic competence signals, selective disclosure, information-seeking, and defensive strategies to create a pattern of interaction that normalized illicit collaboration.
Dr. Fuoli explained: “Access to covert conversations is rare. The size of the corpus meant we were able to produce a comprehensive framework for conversational tactics that can be used to build and manage trust and legitimize wrongdoing.”
Among the five moves, “bond” was most prevalent: traders consistently adopted a friendly, supportive listening stance to build emotional connection. “Build” moves followed, where speakers supplied rational reasons to trust them and sometimes boasted to project competence. “Confide” moves—sharing privileged or seemingly secret information—were used heavily by Enron speakers, creating a sense of insider status for their interlocutors.
External contacts tended to use “probe” moves—asking questions and testing information—while Enron traders relied on “repair” moves to manage any breakdowns in trust. The study found repairs were overwhelmingly defensive: traders preferred justifications or blame-shifting over apologies or direct denials.
Dr. Fuoli is part of Lingsight, a research team of linguists at the University of Birmingham with experience in large-scale public research projects and technology collaborations. He said the framework has clear practical applications: it can help analysts identify roles within criminal networks and guide the design of interventions that recognize the specific conversational rhythms of trust-based scams.
“The framework has diagnostic potential and can inform practical interventions in combating fraud such as phishing or romance scams, but also online radicalization in extremist discussion forums, and ideological harm networks like incel,” Dr. Fuoli said. “Studying trust dynamics in these online spaces can deepen our understanding of recruitment processes and inform better policies and education measures.”
Key Questions Answered:
A: This is the “Confide” move. Revealing privileged information creates a sense of reciprocity and belonging—people feel like insiders and are more likely to overlook the illegality because they feel loyalty to the person who trusted them.
A: Rarely. “Repair” moves were largely defensive: traders typically justified actions or shifted blame rather than offering apologies or straightforward denials.
A: Yes. Identifying the five trust moves (Bond, Build, Confide, Probe, Repair) offers a template for training both AI systems and human analysts to spot the conversational patterns that characterize trust-based scams and recruitment strategies.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- The journal paper was reviewed in full for accuracy.
- Additional context was provided by our editorial staff.
About this linguistics and psychology research news
Author: Ruth Ashton
Source: University of Birmingham
Contact: Ruth Ashton – University of Birmingham
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News