Fake FAFSA deadline lure — "your federal student aid application is overdue, complete in 48 hours or lose eligibility" targeting US college students + families; SSN + tax-return harvest (2024-2025 FAFSA-rollout-disaster exploitation)
fake-fafsa-deadline-lure
What this tier means
High-confidence threat indicator — phishing, impersonation, BEC, or scam pattern. Strong contributor to the trash decision.
How Gorganizer detects this
Fake "your FAFSA submission is overdue — complete in 48 hours or lose federal aid eligibility" email targeting US college students and families. Harvests SSN + adjusted gross income + tax-return data + school info for identity theft and benefits-fraud downstream. The 2024-2025 FAFSA rollout disaster (multi-month processing delays, formula errors affecting millions of applicants) conditioned families to expect "urgent fix needed" messages, amplifying the attack's conversion rate. Distinct from `fake-scholarship-financial-aid-fee-scam` (upfront-fee framing) and `fake-student-loan-forgiveness-fee-scam` (post-graduation). Fires when the body references FAFSA / federal student aid / aid eligibility AND contains deadline urgency. Excludes .edu (college/university aid offices) and .gov umbrellas plus explicit entries (studentaid.gov, fafsa.gov, ed.gov, fafsa.ed.gov, ifap.ed.gov, nslds.ed.gov). Auto-classified as danger via the `-lure` suffix.
False-positive guard
Every signal in Gorganizer feeds a multi-module score — never a sole verdict. This is a threat-tier signal — it adds a strong contribution to the trash score. The full pipeline still requires convergence across multiple modules + a margin over the safety floor before deletion happens, and Gmail's trash (30-day recovery) is always used — never permanent delete.
About the scoring engine
Gorganizer's scoring engine emits 2,143+ signals across six modules — headers, sender, subject, body, attachments, and structural metadata. Every email is scored by every module independently; the final verdict requires multiple modules to agree and the trash score to beat the safety floor by a margin.
Sacred safety guards — never delete starred emails, replies, calendar invites, receipts/invoices, or attachments — apply unconditionally regardless of any signal.
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