Holiday Phishing Scams: What Marketers Need to Know and Do

Every year, cybercriminals circle dates like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the pre-Christmas rush in red on their calendars.

According to analysis from Darktrace, in 2024 Black Friday–themed phishing emails surged by almost 700% in the weeks leading up to the November holiday. During peak shopping periods like Christmas, phishing attacks on major US retail brands shot up by over 2,000%.

For marketers and ecommerce teams, the rise in holiday phishing scams has two consequences: your audience is more likely than ever to be targeted by convincing fake emails, and your own legitimate campaigns are competing with a lot of dangerous noise in the inbox. If customers get burned by a “sale” email that steals their card details, they might not trust yours next time, even if you did everything right.

This article explains why phishing surges so dramatically around big retail events like holidays, what red flags to watch for, and practical steps marketing and communications teams can take to keep both customers and colleagues safe. We’ll also look at how email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC help keep your brand’s domain out of attackers’ hands.

Why Phishing Spikes Around Holidays

From a criminal’s point of view, seasonal events create the perfect conditions for social engineering. People expect floods of discount emails, shipping notifications, and “one-day only” offers. Everyone is moving fast, scanning subject lines, and clicking before thinking. That’s exactly the behavior phishers want.

Spikes appear all year long: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, tax season, back-to-school, and major travel periods. Any time your customers are expecting more email than usual, attackers ramp up their efforts to blend in with the crowd.

How Holiday Phishing Tricks People

Holiday-themed phishing isn’t always sophisticated on the technical side, but it’s very smart about psychology. Attackers tune their messages to match what people already expect to see in their inbox:

• “Flash sale ends in 2 hours” subject lines that push urgency and FOMO.
• Fake order confirmations for purchases the victim never made (“View invoice” or “Track package”).
• Bogus shipping updates from delivery brands like “Your parcel could not be delivered. Please confirm your address.”
• Gift card, voucher, or “holiday giveaway” emails asking users to log in or enter payment details.
• Lookalike domains (for example, replacing one letter with a similar character) that visually pass a quick skim check.

For busy customers skimming dozens of offers, these messages feel normal. The logos look right, the tone sounds like a real brand, and the timing lines up with their shopping behavior. That’s why education and process matter just as much as technical controls.

How Marketers and Ecommerce Teams Can Reduce Risk

For marketers, phishing emails and domain abuse can hurt key metrics like sender reputation and email deliverability rates.

Marketing is about protecting the trust behind your brand, so during high-risk seasons like Black Friday, there are concrete actions your team can take to keep that trust intact.

1. Make Your Legitimate Emails Easy to Recognize

Attackers rely on confusion. The more your real campaigns look like everything else in the inbox, the easier it is for a fake to slip through. You can help your audience by being intentionally consistent:

• Use a small, predictable set of sending domains and subdomains (for example, “newsletter.yourbrand.com” and “orders.yourbrand.com”).
• Stick to recognizable “From” names, like “YourBrand Orders” or “YourBrand Support,” not random individuals.
• Avoid overly aggressive urgency in subject lines (“Act now or lose everything!”) that mirrors scam tactics.
• Include clear, branded design elements and footer information that you always use. Designwise, here is what could trigger suspicion:
  
  • Misaligned logos or headers
  • Missing alt text on images
  • Broken layouts or unexpected stacking
  • Inconsistent colors or fonts

One smart move ahead of peak season would be to tell your customers what your legitimate emails will look like, and what you’ll never ask for via email (passwords, full card details, etc.). That makes it easier for them to distrust anything that falls outside those boundaries.

2. Educate Customers in the Flow

Rather than publishing a single “security tips” page on your blog and hoping people see it, weave small reminders into your existing customer journeys:

• Add a short line in order confirmation emails: “We will never ask for your password or payment details via email.”
• Use banners in holiday campaigns to remind people to check sender addresses and URLs before clicking.
• Link to a simple guide like How to Detect Phishing Emails in E-Commerce.

These micro-nudges help customers build better habits without slowing them down too much, and they underline that you take security seriously.

3. Tighten Internal Processes During Peak Seasons

Holiday phishing doesn’t just target your customers; it also targets your own staff and agencies. A compromised marketing or ecommerce account can send thousands of malicious emails that appear to come directly from your brand.

• Require multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all marketing platforms and email tools.
• Set clear approval workflows for any “unusual” campaigns, domains, or landing pages launched during peak periods.
• Run quick internal refreshers for your team on spotting phishing, especially fake “platform suspension” or “billing issue” emails.

If you’re working with agencies or external freelancers, make sure they follow the same security standards.

4. Protect Your Domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

Even with great education and processes, you still need technical barriers that stop cybercriminals from sending emails using your domain in the first place. That’s where SPF, DKIM, and DMARC come in.

• SPF tells mailbox providers which servers are allowed to send email for your domain.
• DKIM adds a digital signature so recipients can verify that the message hasn’t been altered.
• DMARC ties everything together and lets you say, “If a message fails these checks, quarantine or reject it.”

Together, these controls make it much harder for attackers to send convincing phishing emails “from” your brand. If you’d like a refresher, see our guide DMARC vs. DKIM vs. SPF: What’s the Difference?.

For a step-by-step overview of enabling DMARC specifically, you can also read our DMARC enablement guide.

How DMARCeye Helps Protect Your Brand During Peak Season

Once you’ve implemented DMARC, the real work begins: monitoring who’s sending on your behalf, spotting new spoofing attempts, and safely tightening your policy from “monitor” to “reject," especially around busy retail periods.

DMARCeye makes that manageable by turning complex XML reports into clear, visual, human-readable insights. You can:

• See which systems and services are actually sending email using your domain.
• Detect unauthorized senders or sudden spikes in suspicious traffic during events and holidays.
• Track SPF, DKIM, and DMARC results across all your domains in one place.
• Move confidently toward full DMARC enforcement without guessing what might break.

With DMARCeye, you'll have real visibility into how your domain is being used (or abused).

Get a free trial of DMARCeye today and start protecting your email domain before the next big shopping surge.

For more information on what you can do to secure your email domain, see our comprehensive email security guide.