The festive season brings excitement, celebration and a sharp rise in consumer activity and every year, the industry treats it as its biggest opportunity. Festive advertising has grown smarter, faster and more personalised. What often goes unsaid is that scam has scaled right alongside it.
As brands roll out exclusive offers, discounts and festive campaigns, fraudsters often mirror the same playbook. They use the excitement around the season to create scams that look increasingly convincing and, in many cases, are difficult for consumers to identify.
That is what makes festive scams particularly concerning. It carries a familiar brand name, borrows a trusted logo, and replicates the look and feel of a genuine campaign closely enough to pass as one.
According to McAfee’s 2025 study, around 33% of Indians have fallen victim to online scams during past festive seasons. Some common forms include fraudsters creating offers that appear too good to miss, redirecting consumers to malicious websites, collecting payment details or promoting deals that do not exist. Demand for popular brands and products rises sharply during the festive season. Fraudsters take advantage of this demand by creating counterfeit products and selling them across different digital platforms. With copied packaging, product images and branding, these products can appear genuine, leaving consumers believing they have made an authentic purchase. Fraudsters also send fake emails, SMS messages and social media communications while posing as trusted brands, banks or delivery partners. Urgent festive offers and account-related alerts are used to trick consumers into sharing passwords, OTPs or payment information, which can then be misused for financial fraud.
Moreover, people also land on lookalike brand domains which imitate genuine brand websites, potentially leading consumers to fraudulent platforms where personal or payment information is captured.
The bigger challenge is not just fraud but misplaced trust. That is the real cost of festive scams. Beyond financial loss, they can break a relationship that may have taken years to build.
But certain practices can help brands protect their customers from scams.
Brands should continuously scan ad copies, metadata and landing pages for brand names, variations and common misspellings and monitor the use of logos, product images and creative assets across partners, resellers and digital platforms. Establish clear escalation and takedown mechanisms for fraudulent listings, phishing pages and lookalike domains. Use artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor search platforms, social media, messaging channels, video platforms, domain registries and other digital spaces for emerging impersonation signals.
This festive season, brands must remember that protecting trust must be as much a part of the festive strategy as creating the offer itself.
The author is CEO & co-founder, mFilterIt.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.