Holiday scams 2025: These common shopping habits make you the easiest target

Holiday scams 2025 highlights how modern shopping habits — fast, mobile and data-for-deals — leave buyers vulnerable during deal-heavy periods such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The report notes that nearly 9 in 10 mobile consumers hand over emails or phone numbers in the name of savings, with 79% signing up for promotional emails, 66% downloading apps for a coupon or discount, and 58% giving their phone number for texts.

A familiar trap is the Walmart gift card scam, where a message claims you’ve qualified for a $750 or $1,000 gift card and leads you into a data-harvesting loop through surveys and offers. Marketplace scams are also prevalent, with around a third of people encountering them weekly and 1 in 10 falling victim, while younger users are the most affected.

The report further highlights postal tracking scams (about 4 in 10 encounters, 62% of respondents), and ad-related malware, which more than half have encountered, with 27% of victims, alongside substantial malvertising and adware risks. The research underpinning the piece was conducted from a March 2025 survey of 1,300 respondents across the United States, the UK, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. According to Malwarebytes Labs.