The holidays are peak revenue season and peak risk. Online and in‑app spending jump, fraudsters ramp up, and the fallout shows up as disputes in January and February. If you’re not ready, a strong December can quietly turn into a painful Q1.
Holiday Spending: More Volume, More Risk
Black Friday 2025 set a new bar. U.S. shoppers spent $11.8B online, up 9.1% year over year, with about $12.5M a minute running through online carts at peak hours. Holiday spending overall is expected to pass $1T for the first time.
While that’s great news for topline growth, it’s also the perfect cover for holiday fraud and every type of scam: more cards, accounts, confusion over shipping, returns, and billing, and more room for disputes weeks after the sale.
Holiday Scams & Fraud to Watch
The FBI’s latest holiday alert calls out familiar patterns, just at higher scale:
- Non‑delivery and non‑payment scams – Goods don’t ship, or buyers never really pay.
- Gift card scams – Victims are pushed to pay with prepaid cards.
- Fake charities and spoofed sites – Seasonal goodwill turns into stolen card data.
Scammers send emails, texts, or social ads that look like real brands, but the links go to cloned websites built to steal cards or logins. The FBI urges shoppers to avoid clicking suspicious links, double‑check URLs (look for https:// and the lock icon), and go directly to the retailer’s site instead of using links in unsolicited messages.
How BOLD Can Help
With BOLD and MX™ Merchant, you can see risk as it develops instead of waiting for end‑of‑month surprises, tracking volume, refunds, chargebacks, and retrievals over the course of the season, drilling into transaction‑level detail when something looks off, and filtering by merchant, MID, channel, or product to see exactly where holiday issues are coming from.
At the same time, you can understand the economics line by line with a clean, true‑to‑terms Schedule A, interchange‑level and residual reporting that shows how much you’re really earning after network fees, fraud, and refunds, plus configurable reports and exports that make it easier to reconcile payouts and spot margin leaks so there are no mystery January fees quietly wiping out December profit.
The Bottom Line
For merchants, these scams show up as chargebacks, write‑offs, and support headaches right after the holidays.
A few basics still help a lot:
- Set expectations early on shipping and cut‑off dates
- Fix clear merchant errors with fast, simple refunds
- Make it easy for customers to contact you before they contact their bank
- Holiday spending is bigger than ever, and so are scams and holiday fraud attempts.
- BOLD helps make sure more of that hard‑won holiday revenue actually sticks: clearer data, cleaner economics, and fewer avoidable disputes.
If your platform is heading into another record season, now’s the time to make sure your payment setup can keep up.
Bibliography
AP News. “Shoppers Spend Billions on Black Friday to Snag Holiday Deals, Despite Wider Economic Uncertainty.” November 2025.
National Retail Federation (NRF). “NRF Expects Holiday Sales to Surpass $1 Trillion for the First Time in 2025.” 2025.
Federal Bureau of Investigation – San Diego Field Office. “FBI San Diego Warns Shoppers to Be Aware of Scams During the 2025 Holiday Season.” November 2025.
