Tenn. — With Black Friday and Cyber Monday right around the corner, online shoppers need to take heed. Savi Security, the consumer tech company that created the free scam checker Scamwise, has released its 2026 Holiday Shopping Scam Report, and it’s not good news
According to Savi Security’s report, online scammers have moved from faking a single product to faking an entire store thanks to generative AI. We spoke with Savi Security Co-Founder and CEO Patrick Coughlin about what you need to know to safeguard your wallet.
“It’s incredible how sophisticated these scam stores have become,” Coughlin noted. “If you go back in time a few years, I’m sure viewers will remember these one product page websites that maybe sold fuzzy pictures of Beanie Babies or things like that where you checked out with PayPal, and those were scams.”
He says today, the scam stores are far more sophisticated:
“We see websites that look like very high-end luxury retailers selling beautiful clothing, evening wear, luxury watches.”
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According to Coughlin, generative AI is enabling scammers to do this at scale:
“75% of the scam stores that we analyzed used AI-generated media and images and text across their website. They used AI to build these sites very quickly and get them into production.”
According to Savi Security’s report, Scamwise users report a new fake story roughly every three minutes, and Myshopify.com is the most common domain among confirmed scam cases.
According to their data, clothing and apparel top the list of items scammers sell, followed by electronics and tools and equipment.
Savi Security offers the following advice on how to spot a fake store:
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Being advertised doesn’t mean it’s legitimate
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Look up the store, not just the deal
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When in doubt, check it out using the Scamwise tool.
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Be on the lookout for fake delivery texts after checkout
Daniel Irwin with the BBB of the Mid-South says online shopping scams are the number one scam reported to BBB Scam Tracker.
“So probably the number one thing you can do to protect yourself is shop with a credit card and not a debit card,” Irwin explained. “It’s much easier to dispute a charge with a credit card than it is a debit card.”
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In addition to fake stores, generative AI has also made it much more difficult to spot deep fakes.
Professor Dipankar Dasgupta is the Director of the Center for Information Assurance at the University of Memphis:
“Verifying identity has become very critical, particularly in deep fakes.”
Dasgupta, who is also a member of the AI Security Council, believes there needs to be regulation:
“I don’t think the self-regulation is going to help anymore because making money is the primary goal.”
We met with a group of his doctoral students to see what they thought of Veriff dot com’s “self test” to try and spot deep fakes:
“Nowadays, the technology is becoming so advanced that even if you think that it’s fake, it’s not, The best example is this image here; it’s actually not fake, but when I initially saw it I thought it was fake,” said Sudarshan Balaji, a computer science student.
“The one on the left, in this case, I would say, is fake,” explained Nicholas Redmond, “But I want to emphasize that within a month from now, this may not be the case.”
He said that’s because the technology is advancing so quickly.
“Right now, you can assume that anything you see is not real; I would start with that assumption if I was viewing anything online.”
If you want to take the self-test to see how good you are at spotting deep fakes, just click on the following link: Real or Fake? The deepfake detection quiz | Veriff
To run a quick check to see if a website is fake, just click on the following link
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