New consumer survey data from McAfee Corp., the global online protection solution, found that a third of Americans have fallen victim to an online scam during the holiday season. And with nearly 60 percent of consumers reporting lost money to these scams (10 percent losing more than $1,000), holiday shoppers told the company they are increasingly on alert.
AI-powered tools are being used to create realistic fakes and messages sent through email and text messages. It’s a huge problem for brands and retailers, given that 57 percent of Americans said that they rank emails and 34 percent said that they rank texts among their biggest motivators to shop, thus being led away from legitimate merchants when they go to purchase.
As reported by WWD, social media shopping in particular has been the source of various points of fraud, from consumers receiving messages from fake sellers to being sold counterfeit luxury items. Abhishek Karnik, head of threat research at McAfee, acknowledged that using AI-powered tools has made scammers even more powerful, with the ability to “move more quickly and easily create near-perfect imitations of trusted brand messages, celebrity faces and voices and websites.”
Overall, the authors of the report said that consumers’ anxiety is being fueled by a rise in scams. Three-fifths of respondents said that they are more worried this year about holiday scams given a surge in AI-powered deepfakes. One in five consumers (which increased to a third of those ages 18 to 34) said they had fallen victim to scams involving AI-generated celebrity endorsements.
Among the report’s key findings is the consumer sentiment around technology’s role in increasingly more sophisticated scams. The company’s data found that 78 percent of Americans believe that cybercriminals ramp up their activity during the holidays, with 88 percent reporting that AI is impacting the number and sophistication of online scams during the holiday season.
Forty-five percent of American shoppers said that they believe scam emails and messages will be more believable than ever and 41 percent think it will be harder to tell the difference between real messages from a retail or delivery service from a fraudulent one due to AI advancements.
Notably, McAfee’s research indicates that consumers’ concerns have merit given the amount of messages being received specifically when looking at a surge in unsolicited holiday shopping emails beginning in October. Black Friday emails saw a 495 percent increase from October to early November. And while some consumers do check the authenticity of a message, many do not, leaving them vulnerable to scams.
When prompted, 64 percent of Americans said that they receive the most scam messages via email, followed by 20 percent who reported messages coming via text and 16 percent citing social media. When asked about the types of scam messages they have seen, 66 percent said they have received a “you’ve won a prize” message and 59 percent said that they had received a fake missed delivery notification or delivery problem notification.
In addition to “too good to be true deals” emails, the company pointed to fake sites that pose as legitimate brands. According to the report, McAfee’s solution has prevented consumers from bad links for Black Friday and Christmas scams more than 81,000 times during just the first month of the holiday shopping season this year.
With more consumers shopping online, particularity on social media, McAfee said that while there are a number of ways to detect deepfakes and other AI-generated fraudulent content, the authors of the report encouraged the use of AI to fight AI.
