Persuasion is a human activity of influence. In marketing, persuasion can help customers find solutions to their problems, make informed choices, or convince someone to buy a useful (or useless) product or service. In computer crimes, persuasion can trick users into revealing sensitive information, or even performing actions that benefit attackers. Phishing is one of the most common and dangerous forms of persuasion-based attacks, as it exploits human vulnerabilities rather than technical ones. Therefore, an intelligent system capable of detecting and classifying persuasion attempts might be useful in protecting users. In this work, an approach that uses Machine Learning to analyze messages based on principles of persuasion and different data representations is presented. The aim of this research is to detect which data representation and which classification algorithm obtain the best results in detecting each principle of persuasion as a prior step to detecting phishing attacks. The results obtained indicate that among the combinations tested, there is one combination of data representation and classification algorithm that performs best. The related classification models obtained can detect the principles of persuasion at a rate that varies between 0.78 and 0.86 of AUC-ROC.