According to TechRepublic, holiday fraud in 2025 is evolving into an industrialized ecosystem with attackers starting their campaigns 10-14 days earlier than peak shopping periods. KasadaIQ tracked a 92% increase in malicious configurations targeting retail and a staggering 400% increase against accommodation industries between January and October 2025. The research found over 311 million stolen accounts listed across dark web marketplaces, with 63% belonging to retail brands. AI-driven bots are expected to account for the majority of holiday web traffic with a predicted 520% increase in AI-generated requests compared to 2024. Gift cards remain the preferred monetization tool with 8.9 million stolen retail cards and 7.5 million QSR cards already identified for resale. Compromised data now moves from breach to resale in under five days as automation dramatically shortens the fraud lifecycle.
The scary new normal
Here’s the thing that really worries me about this year’s fraud landscape – it’s not just about scaling up existing attacks. We’re seeing the complete industrialization of fraud operations. Basically, attackers are treating fraud like a legitimate business with specialized tools, marketplaces, and workflows. They’re selling automation kits and malicious configurations with the same efficiency as legitimate software companies. And generative AI is making everything worse by enabling bots that mimic human behavior almost perfectly. Remember when you could spot a bot because it moved too predictably? Those days are gone.
Why account takeovers are exploding
Account takeover has become the fastest-growing fraud channel for a simple reason – it’s incredibly profitable. Think about it: attackers aren’t just stealing individual payment methods anymore. They’re grabbing entire accounts loaded with stored payment data, loyalty points, and pre-filled shopping carts. Kasada observed over 1,100 credential-stuffing incidents across 133 retailers in just one month, compromising an estimated 265,000 accounts. The timing is strategic too – these attacks typically hit the week before Black Friday when accounts are fully loaded with value. So what’s the defense? Security teams need to treat ATO as an ongoing intelligence campaign rather than isolated incidents.
The AI bot problem is real
Now let’s talk about the AI-powered bots that are expected to dominate holiday traffic this year. We’re not talking about simple scripts anymore. These bots use random movements, hesitations, and input variability that make them nearly indistinguishable from real shoppers. And here’s the kicker – many interact directly with backend APIs, completely bypassing traditional web-based security measures. That means your rate limiting and pattern recognition tools might be completely useless. Organizations really need to adopt behavioral fingerprinting and API-level anomaly detection. The old ways of spotting bots just don’t cut it when the bots are this sophisticated.
How to fight back
So what can organizations actually do? The key insight from this research is that fraud prevention can’t operate in isolation from cybersecurity anymore. You need to start monitoring two weeks earlier than your traditional timelines to catch those preparatory attacks. Protecting account integrity means implementing adaptive multi-factor authentication and detecting logins from unusual device types. And defending APIs is absolutely critical since that’s where most sophisticated bots operate now. The speed of modern fraud means your response needs to be equally fast. Incident response teams have compressed windows to investigate before stolen data gets resold. Unifying fraud and security operations under a single view might be the most important step organizations can take this holiday season.
