Fake landlord claiming a rental application was approved and requiring first month rent plus security deposit to hold the unit before viewing — rental advance-fee fraud; no legitimate landlord requires a deposit before an in-person viewing and a signed lease.
rental-application-deposit-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
Fake landlord or property manager claiming that the target's rental application has been approved and requiring them to send the first month's rent plus a security deposit immediately to hold the unit, with the viewing of the unit to be arranged only after payment is received — rental advance-fee fraud. No legitimate landlord or property manager requires a deposit or advance rent payment before the prospective tenant has viewed the property in person and signed a written lease; "your application was approved, send deposit to hold the unit, viewing arranged after" is a consistent FBI IC3 and FTC rental fraud pattern that exploits housing scarcity anxiety. Distinct from rental-lease-renewal-wire-phish (existing tenant lease renewal / deposit wire) and rental-deposit-refund-phish (deposit refund pretext) — this targets the rental application approval / pre-viewing deposit / hold-the-unit / viewing-arranged-after pretext. Detection: application approved + send/wire first month and security deposit + hold the unit + viewing arranged after payment vocabulary + no List-Unsubscribe + no In-Reply-To + not protected sender. Trash score: +4. Source: GC1-R28; FBI IC3 rental fraud advisory 2025; FTC rental scam consumer alert; CFPB rental deposit fraud patterns.
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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