Black Friday and Cyber Monday Scams: Staying Ahead of the Year-End Rush

Black Friday and Cyber Monday scams spike every year, and last year’s numbers show why enterprises need to prepare now. Phishing attacks targeting shoppers surged 620% at the start of November 2025, according to Darktrace, as attackers used the flood of seasonal marketing emails to hide fraudulent messages in plain sight.

Enterprises that rely on their sender reputation for marketing, sales, and customer communication become collateral damage in these campaigns. Cyber Week stretches from Thanksgiving through December 3 this year, and every extra day of promotional email gives attackers more room to blend in. Security teams that only prepare for a single day of risk end up defending against a month-long campaign instead.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Scams Exploit Trusted Domains

Cybercriminals don’t need to build a new playbook for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They send phishing emails timed to land in a crowded inbox alongside real Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing.

Customers already expect a wave of discount codes, shipping updates, and order confirmations this time of year, which makes well-timed phishing emails far easier to miss.

Bitdefender’s Antispam Lab found that between October 1 and November 10, 2025, scams accounted for 53% of all global Black Friday-related spam by volume. Brand impersonation, defined as cloning logos, marketing language, and design from trusted companies, was the defining tactic behind that spam. Attackers aren’t inventing new methods so much as scaling a familiar one against a bigger audience.

Spoofed Emails and Lookalike Domains Rely on Unauthenticated Senders

Behind every spoofed email is a technical gap. Cybercriminals send unauthenticated email that appears to come from a trusted domain, and they register lookalike domains that mimic a brand’s name. A spoofed email doesn’t need to be perfect. It only needs to look enough like the real thing to survive a quick glance. A single misplaced letter in a domain name, or a logo lifted from an official site, is often enough to clear that bar.

Many enterprises generally don’t know about lookalike or spoofed domains attempting to impersonate their organization until a customer, partner, or employee reports one, often after the damage is done. By the time a spoofed email reaches a security team’s attention, it has already been read, clicked, and forwarded by the people it was designed to fool.

DMARC enforcement closes part of this gap. Full enforcement tells receiving servers to reject unauthenticated email, so it never reaches an inbox. It doesn’t stop attackers from attempting impersonation in the first place, and it has no role in preventing lookalike domains.

That distinction matters for security teams setting expectations before the year-end rush hits.

DMARC works alongside SPF and DKIM. SPF checks whether an email came from a server authorized to send on the domain’s behalf, and DKIM checks whether the message’s signature is valid. DMARC checks whether either result aligns with the domain in the ‘From’ address, then applies a policy based on the outcome.

Neither SPF nor DKIM enforces anything on its own, and enforcement only applies once a domain owner has moved past the monitoring stage.

Lookalike Domain Defense detects domains designed to impersonate your brand before they’re used in attacks. Catching a lookalike domain before it is weaponized means responding to an alert instead of a customer complaint.

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book found that Americans lost more than $432 million to online shopping fraud in 2024 alone, a reminder of how quickly individual spoofed emails and lookalike domains add up to real losses.

Extend Protection Beyond the Year-End Rush

Full DMARC enforcement is not the finish line. Ongoing monitoring and optimization keep protection current as new senders, new domains, and new lookalike attempts appear throughout the year-end period and into the new year. New phishing emails will keep arriving long after Cyber Monday ends, because attackers are still chasing the same customer trust that made this year-end rush profitable.

That ongoing monitoring needs to watch for more than external impersonation. A hijacked internal account can send phishing emails that carry the same trust signals customers already rely on, so detecting compromised or breached employee credentials matters just as much as catching a spoofed domain. Enterprises that stay ahead of both threats spend less time on incident response.

Enterprises that treat DMARC as a one-time project are the ones still explaining a spoofed email to a customer next November. Enterprises that treat it as an ongoing program are the ones catching phishing emails before they reach an inbox at all.

Test your domain to see where it stands against Black Friday and Cyber Monday scams before shoppers, or attackers, find out first.