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ThreatPhishing & impersonation

Fake paid survey / credential harvest scam — you have been selected for a paid survey + earn $500/$750 + provide credit card / SSN to verify age or pay membership fee

fake-survey-paid-participation-credential-harvest

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 paid survey and credential-harvest scam — unsolicited emails telling the recipient they have been "selected" for an exclusive paid consumer survey promising implausibly large payouts ($300–$750) for 5–10 minutes of work. The hook is collecting payment credentials or PII rather than genuine market research: victims are asked to provide a credit card "for age verification only" (never charged), pay a $25–$49 "premium membership fee" to access high-paying surveys, or submit their Social Security Number "for a background check" to qualify. A common variant mimics Amazon, Walmart, or Google branding and promises a gift card reward in exchange for completing a short survey and paying a "$1.99 shipping fee" — a classic advance-fee setup. Legitimate paid research panels (Nielsen, Kantar, Ipsos, Prolific, SurveyMonkey) never require a credit card to join, never charge upfront fees, and never ask for an SSN as a qualification step. The FTC 2024 Consumer Sentinel reported "prize, sweepstakes and lottery" and "online shopping/negative option" scams — the categories these fall into — as the #1 and #3 most-reported fraud types. No legitimate $500 survey opportunity arrives as an unsolicited cold email.

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 over 1,800 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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