AI-driven scams are set to target holiday shoppers this season

Deepfake ads, synthetic identities, and "verify yourself" traps are making shopping fraud cheaper, more convincing, and easier to scale, just as the busiest sales weeks of the year approach.

New York, Nov. 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the holiday sales season on the horizon, Veriff's fraud expert Ira Bondar-Mucci is sharing a few tips to help shoppers stay a step ahead of increasingly convincing scams.

"Sales events squeeze the time people take to make a decision," said Bondar-Mucci, Fraud Platform Lead at Veriff. "With countdown clocks ticking, shoppers click on things they normally might question under other circumstances, and fraudsters build their campaigns around exactly that. The tricks are familiar: fake deals, bogus delivery notices, phony customer support. What's new is that AI has made them cheaper to create, more believable, and much easier to run at scale."

When seeing isn't believing

Scam shops no longer have to rely on a polished website alone. They can now add a video of a familiar-looking face endorsing the offer, a "support agent" on a live video call, or a cloned voice saying an order is on hold until payment details are confirmed.

Veriff’s Deepfakes Report 2026*, produced with Kantar, found that Americans and Britons alike do only slightly better than chance when asked to tell real visuals from AI-generated ones. Video proved the trickiest format for both: even when real and fake clips were shown side by side, many people took the fake for the real thing, and vice versa.

Confidence can work against shoppers

Britons are the most familiar with the term “deepfake” of the countries surveyed, yet awareness has not translated into sharper detection. Roughly half of Americans, and slightly fewer Britons, said they could reliably spot manipulated media, but their actual results were close to random guessing. In the UK, more than one in five admit they don’t try to verify suspicious content they see online.

Roughly 7% of people, a small but significant group, fall into an especially high-risk category: they have trouble identifying fakes, feel sure of themselves anyway, and seldom check a second source.

“That’s exactly who a well-made deepfake ad is aimed at,” said Bondar-Mucci. “Once people feel they can’t be fooled, they stop looking for warning signs.”

Concern is high on both sides of the Atlantic, with large majorities in both countries worried about deepfake-driven personal fraud, such as impersonation.

Behind the scenes

Generative AI also allows a single fraudster to produce hundreds of fake identities, each complete with a face, a document, and a backstory. They are used to set up seller, payment, and buy-now-pay-later accounts, as well as mule accounts for moving stolen funds. Any one identity may pass inspection; the giveaway is the pattern, such as the same face, device, or network surfacing across accounts that supposedly belong to different people.

Some scams skip fake identities entirely and enlist genuine people instead. Targets, often approached through a bogus job offer, a prize or refund claim, or a romance or investment chat, are asked to complete an identity check for someone else. The request sounds routine, such as confirming who you are to receive a refund, but the real person ends up giving a scammer control of an account.

Following the money

Fraudsters often steer victims away from the shopping platform and toward a text thread, messaging app, bank transfer, gift cards, or crypto, where buyer protections no longer apply. Genuine retailers don't ask customers to take a conversation or a payment off-platform to secure a deal. Four habits for safer holiday shopping:

1. Start at the source. Enter the retailer's address or open its app instead of tapping an ad, text, or social post.
2. Cross-check celebrity deals. Treat any celebrity or influencer endorsement as unconfirmed until the same offer appears on the retailer's own website.
3. Protect your codes and your face. Keep one-time passcodes private, and don't complete an ID or selfie check through a link someone sent you. If you didn't start it, stop.
4. Stay on the platform. Pay by credit card for the strongest protection, and treat any request to switch to a bank transfer, gift cards, or crypto as a red flag.

Shoppers shouldn't have to carry this alone

"Shoppers shouldn't have to shoulder this alone," said Bondar-Mucci. "Organizations that depend on manual review or on customers vouching for themselves are exposed. Retailers, marketplaces, and payment providers need checks that don't hinge on what the human eye can see: confirming a live person is present, making sure the camera feed hasn't been tampered with, and linking signals across sessions so a reused face or device gets noticed."

She added that protection shouldn't end at sign-up, since some of the riskiest moments come later, such as a password reset, a new payout account, or a large order placed mid-sale. "The deepfake arms race is an AI problem, and it will take AI to solve it."

*Veriff Deepfakes Report 2026, an online survey conducted by Kantar among 3,000 adults aged 18–64 in the US, UK, and Brazil.

About Veriff

Veriff is an AI-native enterprise identity platform that helps organizations build trust online. Leading companies across financial services, marketplaces, mobility, gig economy, and other digital sectors rely on Veriff’s technology to stay compliant, prevent fraud, protect users, and scale globally.

Veriff’s trust infrastructure supports the full customer journey, from verification to ongoing authentication and fraud prevention, with the least friction for honest people. Built for global scale, Veriff helps businesses expand across borders without the complexity of managing identity verification, compliance, and fraud in multiple markets – creating a single source of truth for trusted identities.

CONTACT: Veriff
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