Black Friday Beware: AI-Powered Phishing Scams Targeting Holiday Shoppers

As Black Friday 2025 approaches, shoppers are gearing up for massive deals—but so are cybercriminals. In July 2025, a Fortune 500 retailer lost 40,000 customer records in under 48 hours, just months before the holiday rush.

The breach didn’t begin with a phishing email; it started on Instagram. AI-generated deepfake videos of the company’s CEO flooded customer feeds, “announcing” a new mobile shopping app with an exclusive pre-Black Friday discount. Thousands downloaded what appeared to be an official product launch. Instead, they installed malware designed to harvest credentials and payment data.

The chilling detail? The CEO never recorded those videos. They were deepfake clones, crafted from publicly available content and amplified across platforms by bot-driven campaigns. With Black Friday looming, this tactic is poised to explode, preying on deal-hungry consumers scrolling for savings.

For seasoned cyber analysts, this wasn’t just another social engineering incident. It was AI-powered phishing at enterprise scale—a campaign so convincing that initial responders suspected an insider breach before uncovering the truth. As we head into the holiday shopping season, this is the new frontier of cybercrime, demanding a sharper, more proactive response to protect shoppers and brands alike.

The Silent Revolution in Holiday Cybercrime

Exploiting trust in ways traditional defenses can’t stop, phishing has entered a new era, perfectly timed for high-stakes events like Black Friday. An independent study found that 76% of detected phishing sites in Q2 2025 used AI-generated content, fueling a 150% year-over-year surge in unique campaigns. The FBI warns that attackers are now scraping every selfie, video, and casual post to train AI systems that clone identities and launch hyper-personalized lures—especially during shopping frenzies when users are more impulsive.

This isn’t just scale—it’s precision-tailored to holiday urgency. Analysts aren’t fighting recycled spam anymore; they’re facing synthetic adversaries engineered from our own digital footprints. These threats wield NLP, computer vision, and behavioral analytics to impersonate trusted entities with uncanny accuracy, erasing the old telltale signs of a scam. Come Black Friday, expect a flood of fake flash sales and exclusive deals that feel too real to ignore.

The New Battlefield: Social Media Deception

Phishing has vaulted from crude email blasts to a sophisticated assault woven into the fabric of our daily digital lives, with social media becoming ground zero for holiday deception. Threat actors no longer rely on scattershot spam—they infiltrate the platforms we trust, exploiting their intimacy and immediacy to hijack Black Friday excitement:

• Instagram: DMs pose as exclusive brand giveaways or pre–Black Friday access links.
• TikTok: Comment threads hide malicious URLs behind trending hashtags.
• YouTube: Deepfake ads mirror legitimate retailer branding with fabricated doorbuster deals.
• Facebook: Synthetic executive “posts” promote limited-time offers designed to go viral.

This shift exploits three critical vulnerabilities amplified during Black Friday:

• Weak Defenses: Unlike enterprise email systems with robust gateways, social platforms lack equivalent real-time filtering, leaving gaps for AI-driven scams to slip through amid the holiday noise.
• Inherent Trust: Users instinctively trust posts from friends, brands, or influencers, especially when AI makes fakes indistinguishable from reality—perfect for exploiting deal-seeking mindsets.
• Overwhelming Scale: Billions of daily interactions create a chaotic digital haystack, where malicious content thrives undetected, especially during traffic spikes.

For Security Operations Centers (SOCs), this demands a pivot from email-focused defenses to real-time social media threat monitoring. Static tools like spam filters or URL blacklists are outpaced by AI’s speed and adaptability, requiring dynamic analytics to track evolving threats as Black Friday approaches.

Black Friday in the Crosshairs: Real-World Examples of AI Deception

Example 1: The Influencer Impersonation Surge

A recent report reveals a stark truth: 80% of people struggle to distinguish deepfakes from authentic content, making them highly vulnerable to AI-generated impersonations of influencers or trusted figures—vulnerabilities that spike during holiday sales..

In a campaign documented by Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission, criminals cloned tech influencer Elon Musk, with over 200 million followers on X. Using his likeness, voice, and signature tech-hype style from real interviews, they crafted deepfake videos promoting a fraudulent cryptocurrency trading app. These weren’t random blasts—AI systems profiled victims, targeting tech enthusiasts and crypto investors based on their engagement with Musk’s posts, inferred spending habits, and risk-tolerant psychological traits scraped from social media data. Victims faced tailored ads and DMs, losing over AUD $30 million. This was surgical deception, not mass spam, powered by AI-driven behavioral analytics—foreshadowing what could hit shoppers en masse this November.

For analysts, this signals an urgent need for advanced defenses: anomaly detection in content metadata, real-time monitoring of posting behavior, and cross-platform tracking to uncover coordinated campaigns. Signature-based tools are obsolete against AI’s shapeshifting tactics, especially in holiday chaos.

Example 2:  The Celebrity-Endorsed Holiday Hoax

In early 2024, scammers harnessed AI to generate deepfake videos and ads featuring pop icon Taylor Swift, boasting over 300 million Instagram followers and a massive North American fanbase. The content, synthesized from her public speeches, interviews, and social media clips, falsely claimed she was partnering with luxury brand Le Creuset for a free cookware giveaway due to a "packaging error" that supposedly left excess inventory—a ploy that could easily morph into Black Friday "overstock" scams.

These deceptive promotions flooded platforms like Facebook, targeting Swifties—fans engaged with her content, lifestyle posts, or cooking-related interests—through algorithmic personalization based on user data like past interactions, demographics, and inferred purchasing behaviors. This wasn't generic spam; victims clicking the ads were directed to phony websites mimicking legitimate e-commerce pages, where they provided personal details and payment info for "shipping fees." Instead, they faced recurring unauthorized charges, identity theft, and malware downloads, with individual losses often reaching thousands of dollars and widespread reports across the U.S. and Canada totaling in the millions. Le Creuset and Swift's representatives confirmed no such partnership existed, highlighting how AI erased scam indicators like poor grammar or mismatched branding.

For analysts, this exemplifies the shift of AI-phishing into consumer goods deception, exploiting brand trust during everyday scrolling—and ramping up for Black Friday. It calls for proactive tools like AI-powered ad verification, behavioral anomaly detection, and collaboration with platforms to flag synthetic media in real time, preventing escalation during viral trends.

Example 3: The Black Friday Deception

Black Friday 2025 could be the ultimate proving ground: attackers launch AI-generated ads mimicking major retailers and celebrity endorsers, promising unbeatable doorbusters. The branding, tone, and video quality are flawless, down to the retailer’s favicon and the influencer’s signature catchphrase. The catch? Checkout pages redirect to malware-laced payment portals, stealing data amid the shopping frenzy.

This isn’t hypothetical—it draws from real patterns. In 2024, similar campaigns spiked during high-traffic shopping events, with the UK’s NCSC logging thousands of compromised accounts in hours. Attackers exploit distracted users chasing deals, mirroring tactics used in election-day disinformation drops but amplified by holiday urgency. For analysts, this means anticipating high-risk windows—major sales like Black Friday—and scaling detection efforts. Tools must parse visual and textual anomalies in real time, correlating them with threat intelligence to spot campaigns before they spread and ruin the holidays.

Why Social Platforms Are the Perfect Storm for Black Friday Attacks

Three converging factors create the ideal environment for AI-powered phishing during shopping seasons:

• Trust Paradigm: Platforms are built on assumed authenticity, which crumbles when AI fakes flood feeds with irresistible deals.
• Moderation Gaps: Pattern-based filters miss personalized, one-off lures tailored to holiday shoppers.
• Signal-to-Noise: Billions of interactions drown out malicious campaigns amid Black Friday buzz.

The result? Malicious content blends seamlessly into legitimate chatter, slipping past firewalls and endpoint protection while users hunt for savings.

The Psychology of AI-Phishing: Preying on Holiday Impulses

What makes these attacks devastating isn’t just realism—it’s psychological precision tuned to Black Friday behaviors. AI can tailor persuasion to personality:

• Introverts → private, friendly offers for exclusive early access.
• Anxious users → urgent “act now” prompts before deals expire.
• Status-driven users → VIP holiday deals.
• Trust-based personalities → influencer or executive endorsements for limited-stock items.

This is a psychological operation by algorithm, deployed at scale during peak shopping distraction. For analysts, understanding these tactics means shifting from reactive URL blocking to proactive behavioral profiling of both attackers and targets.

How ZeroFox Counters AI-Powered Phishing This Black Friday

ZeroFox delivers a true threat-informed defense against AI-powered phishing by focusing on the root of these attacks while leveraging advanced AI and threat intelligence to stay ahead of evolving threats, especially during high-risk periods like Black Friday. Here’s how ZeroFox empowers analysts to tackle this new wave of deception:

• Domain-Centric Protection: ZeroFox monitors over 100 million domains daily, identifying and disrupting typosquats, homoglyphs, and subdomain spoofs before they reach holiday shoppers. By targeting the infrastructure behind phishing campaigns, ZeroFox stops attacks at their source, unlike reactive email or SMS filters.
• AI-Powered Detection: Using machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, ZeroFox detects sophisticated threats like deepfakes, cloaked URLs, and impersonated social media profiles. This includes analyzing text, images, and videos for malicious intent, catching content that evades traditional filters amid Black Friday traffic.
• Anti-Cloaking Capabilities: ZeroFox counters advanced evasion techniques like geo-blocking and user-agent filtering with residential proxies mimicking victim IP addresses. This ensures cloaked phishing sites are exposed and taken down swiftly.
• Threat Intelligence: Processing billions of daily signals from social media, the deep and dark web, and other digital channels, ZeroFox provides actionable insights into emerging threats like SEO poisoning and phishing-as-a-service—crucial for predicting Black Friday spikes.
• Automated Takedowns: ZeroFox’s Universal Takedown services, combined with a streamlined submission tool, enable rapid removal of malicious content—sometimes in as little as 30 seconds. This minimizes dwell time and reduces financial and reputational damage during shopping peaks.
• Integration with Security Ecosystems: ZeroFox feeds integrate with SOAR, SIEM, and TIP platforms, allowing analysts to correlate phishing alerts with broader threat data and automate remediation workflows.

For example, in a recent campaign, ZeroFox detected a deepfake-driven phishing operation targeting a financial institution ahead of a major sales event. By identifying fraudulent domains and social media posts mimicking the brand’s favicon and tone, ZeroFox’s platform triggered automated takedowns and alerted the SOC team, preventing widespread credential theft.

ZeroFox’s approach equips analysts with the visibility and tools to combat AI-driven phishing across the surface, deep, and dark web, ensuring threats are neutralized before they erode trust or revenue this Black Friday.

Building Holiday-Ready Defenses

Defending against AI-powered phishing demands a paradigm shift, especially for Black Friday. Analysts must move beyond traditional tools and adopt proactive, intelligence-driven strategies:

• Behavioral Detection > Signature Detection: AI-driven systems must analyze posting cadence, linguistic anomalies, and cross-platform coordination—not just known malicious URLs— to catch holiday-specific lures.
• Digital Literacy for Analysts and Users: Analysts need frameworks to spot synthetic media, such as inconsistencies in video metadata or unnatural linguistic patterns. Users must be trained to question even “verified” content during deal hunts.
• Verified Trust Infrastructure: Blockchain or cryptographic authenticity proofs may become essential; blue checkmarks are no longer enough to ensure trust amid fake promotions.
• Dynamic Security Postures: Defenses should scale during high-risk periods like Black Friday, with ramped-up monitoring for urgency-driven scams.

ZeroFox’s platform aligns with these principles, offering real-time monitoring, behavioral analytics, and automated disruption to keep analysts ahead of the curve.

The Road Ahead: Bracing for Black Friday and Beyond

This holiday season, attackers will deploy realistic deepfakes, cloned voices, and personalized fake ads faster than humans can verify them. The only viable defense is one step ahead—profiling attacker behavior, not just cleaning up after the fallout.

ZeroFox empowers SOC teams to anticipate threats, disrupt synthetic campaigns at the source, and protect shoppers before deception reaches their feeds.

Don’t wait for an attack.

Protect your brand, your executives, and your customers this Black Friday.

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