translate the following paragraphs into Chinese. Moreover, con artists tend to exploit their pre-existing identities, especially 
their personal identities. On the one hand, the con artist’s attempt to change 
their real personal identity such as gender, age, or ethnicity through discursive 
practices would face tremendous challenges and it is usually unnecessary. On the 
other hand, interactional and situational identities tend to be context-specific, 
fabricated if an opportunity is provided. Since others do not automatically vali￾date a person’s claims to be honest, reasonable, etc, pre-existing personal attrib￾utes in frauds are usually subordinate to other identities. For instance, in Case (1), 
the assumption that women are the relatively ‘weaker’ gender (than men) is read-
116 east asian pragmatics
ily made use of by con artists. In Case (2), a question such as ‘Guess who I am?’ 
accords with women’s style of speech. In Case (5), the resemblance between the 
names of Liu Zhongping and Liu Zhongtian creates in people’s minds the possibility that they may be brothers. Similarly, Liu Zhongping’s identity as a resourceful person is based on his interactional identity as ‘brother of Liu Zhongtian’. 
Interestingly, although Liu Zhongping’s self-assumed personal identity violates 
common expectation, it facilitates the deceptive act: since people with high power 
and insider information are usually indifferent, the ‘help’ from ‘a brother of the 
board chairman’ is indeed hard to resist.
6. Adaptation involved in the identity fabrication
In this section, we discuss the motivations for con artists to construct specific 
identities in specific contexts and on specific targets. As indicated earlier, we view 
con artists’ construction of the identities concerned as being in part motivated by 
their need to adapt to the particular discourse they are engaged in (Chen, 2018).
Since all the 72 fraud cases examined for this article fall into the five types of 
identities outlined above, we cannot help but wonder whether these identities 
were chosen at random or on purpose and why they were preferred over others. 
As is suggested in our discussion of the theoretical framework we adopt, con artists fabricate identities according to factors in physical, social, and mental worlds. 
If they do not adapt to these three worlds, they may fail to match the fabricated 
identities with the corresponding discursive practices. In this section, we present 
more fraud cases (Table 3).
6.1 Adaptation to the physical world
Due to the fast advancement of technology and urbanisation, people in China 
have become heavily dependent on the Internet and the mobile phone to conduct 
activities in their life, which has led to a paucity of face-to-face communication. 
This has been taken advantage of by con artists in two principal ways. First, they 
use the mobile phone as a mode of communication to contact the target and to 
commit the fraud, as is seen in Cases (2), (3), and (4). If a fraud is conducted in 
a physical location, the location tends to be a place crowded with people who are 
strangers to each other, such as a matchmaking agency, bar, beauty salon, or the 
busy street, so that the con artist can easily hide his or her true identity. Second, 
the identity of a telecom clerk has become a distinctive identity as shown above. 
This is significant because telecom clerk is a professional identity, and the list of 
possible professional identities in a given culture must be very long. The fact that 
con artists have chosen the telecom profession as their favourite speaks much to 
their effort to adapt to the physical world of modern China, whereby so much 
communication is conducted by phone.   6.2 Adaptation to the social world
A social setting imposes many constraints on the way linguistic acts can be per￾formed. It also determines who has the right to perform them (Verschueren, 1999, 
p. 91). Accordingly, con artists adapt to the ratified convention between identity 
and speech acts. For instance, the con artists who construct the identity of a tele￾com clerk in Case (3) and in case 10086 in Table 8 adapt to the fact that one of the 
functions of telecom companies is to inform clients of abnormal account activity. 
In the same vein, the institutionally defined power of the government, including 
judicial official in Case (4) and the Education Bureau in Table 8, enables con art￾ists to give orders and commands. As the target in Case (4) recollects, “When she 
Table 3: Information on fraud crimes