Fake lottery or sweepstakes prize advance-fee fraud claiming the target has won a cash prize but must pay a processing fee, tax withholding, or customs duty before receiving winnings — no legitimate prize requires upfront payment.
lottery-sweepstakes-prize-phish
What this tier means
High-confidence threat indicator — phishing, impersonation, BEC, or scam pattern. Strong contributor to the trash decision.
How Gorganizer detects this
Classic advance-fee lottery and sweepstakes fraud: the target is told they have won a large cash prize or sweepstakes but must pay a processing fee, tax withholding, customs duty, or release fee before receiving the winnings. No legitimate lottery or sweepstakes requires upfront payment to claim a prize; this is a high-volume fraud pattern documented by the FBI IC3 as one of the top three consumer scam categories by victim loss. Detection: you have won/lucky winner/sweepstakes prize vocabulary + pay fee/tax withholding/processing fee to claim vocabulary + no List-Unsubscribe + no In-Reply-To + not protected sender. Trash score: +4. Source: GC1-R23; FBI IC3 advance-fee fraud 2025; FTC sweepstakes scam advisory.
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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