Fake prize notification / foreign lottery scam — your email selected in Microsoft/Google/EuroMillions/UN lottery + you won millions + pay release fee/lottery tax + provide bank details to claim
fake-prize-notification-foreign-lottery-scam
What this tier means
High-confidence threat indicator — phishing, impersonation, BEC, or scam pattern. Strong contributor to the trash decision.
How Gorganizer detects this
Cold-email lottery and prize notification fraud — one of the oldest and most pervasive email scam formats. Victims are told their email address was "randomly selected" as the winner of a foreign lottery (EuroMillions, Spanish Lottery, UK National Lottery), an online prize draw sponsored by a tech company (Microsoft, Google), a branded consumer promotion (Coca-Cola, Samsung), or a United Nations award. The victim won millions, but must pay a "prize release fee," "lottery tax," "processing fee," or "courier fee" to receive their prize — ranging from $150 to $1,000. Bank account details, passport scans, and personal information are also collected. The prize never arrives. Key rules: you cannot win a lottery you never entered; no legitimate prize requires payment to claim; real competition winnings are never accompanied by "this must remain confidential."
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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