You're scrolling through Facebook, but an ad stops you mid-swipe… it’s a coat everyone's been raving about, half off with free shipping! That’s crazy, and with a countdown clock ticking away at the top of the ad, you know you have to be quick. It looks real, and maybe even has a return policy listed when you visit the link. What’s the harm in a good deal?

Well, how about the fact that there's a decent chance it isn't real at all? This year stores like that are popping up faster and more frequently than ever before.

A free scam checker called Scamwise tracked what its users were reporting from March through October this year and found a new fake store showing up roughly every 3 minutes, somewhere around 500 a day. Notably, I want to be upfront about the fact that this report comes from one company's own user submissions, not an inde pendent nationwide count, but the direction matches what other security companies are seeing too. 

Gen, the company behind Norton and Avast, says it blocked 45 million fake shopping site attempts in just the last quarter of 2025 alone. 

AI is a big part of why this scaled up so fast. Building a convincing storefront used to take real time, product photos, descriptions, a return policy page, a maybe even a home or office that looked lived in. Now AI can generate all of that in minutes, which is likely why about three out of every four fake stores Scamwise found this year used AI-generated content. These aren't the clumsy, obviously-fake sites from a few years back. Most look genuinely professional, full ca talog and all, and that makes it harder to differentiate real from fake. 

These websites are also built to disappear. Roughly seven out of ten of these fake stores get used once and vanish, and a lot of them are gone again within about two weeks… which is right around the time people start noticing something's off. By the time a shut-down site gets reported, three more have already taken its place.

There's a newer wrinkle this year too, specifically for anyone using an AI shopping assistant to hunt for holiday deals or compare prices. Visa has pointed out that one of these AI tools can actually be easier to fool than a person. A human tends to pause and get a little suspicious of a store they've never heard of, or squint at a link that has an extra word or two. However, an AI agent handling the purchase doesn't necessarily have that instinct unless it's told to, which matters a lot once it has access to a saved card. 

For the record, none of this means you need to stop shopping online. It's just a warning that it's worth slowing down and looking for a few specific things before you check out. Here's a few tips to help you out this holiday season.

1. If you've never heard of the store, search its name along with the word reviews or scam before buying anything.

2. If a discount looks too good, pull up the same item from a retailer you already trust and compare.

3. Double check that the website you're visiting, even if it looks official, is the actual website. 

a. A couple years ago, I’d see ads that were pushing SparkPaws sweatshirts (a brand of matching sweaters for you and your dog) at a crazy discount, but the link had something extra tacked on (like sparkpaws.scam.com, as an example). They’d copied the website almost perfectly, but they couldn’t steal their URL!

4. You should treat any ad as just a tip, not proof the store is legitimate, and go find the actual store yourself rather than clicking straight through.

5. A countdown timer or urgent "only 3 left" message is doing exactly what it's designed to do, so don't let it rush you.

6. Pay with a credit card instead of a debit card or a direct bank transfer, since you'll have real dispute protection if something goes wrong.