Key takeaway: Merchants and platforms are heading into Black Friday and Cyber Monday against a flood of AI-built fake storefronts. Most are short-lived and never advertised. A growing share of them now surface through Myshopify-hosted domains rather than marketplaces like Amazon or eBay.
Savi Security makes Scamwise, a free scam-checking tool. The company’s 2026 Holiday Shopping Scam Report, released October 20, 2026, found that users report a new fake online store roughly every three minutes — about 500 per day.
The report draws on more than 1 million consumer submissions to Scamwise since March 2026. That includes over 250,000 e-commerce site reports and more than 100,000 sites that Scamwise rated Definitely or Likely a Scam. Reports of fake holiday-themed stores have grown fivefold over the last 60 days.
Myshopify.com is now the most common domain among confirmed scam cases in Scamwise’s data — ahead of Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and Walmart combined, according to the report. (Savi Security’s release doesn’t explain why Myshopify ranks highest — whether that reflects broader abuse of the platform or simply how easy it is to spin up a store there.)
Most of these stores are disposable. Seven in ten get reported only once. Nearly 40% are under 90 days old when first flagged. And 85% disappear within two weeks. At least one in five fake stores trace back to an ad on a major platform — Meta and Google are the preferred channels.
“Generative AI has turned scammers into big box retailers of bogus products,” said Patrick Coughlin, co-founder and CEO of Savi Security. Chris Olson, co-founder and CEO of ad-threat monitoring firm The Media Trust, said scammers are entering the shopping season with a head start. He pointed to a sharp surge in fraudulent ad activity his company detected in September.
Why it matters: Fake storefronts that disappear within two weeks and lean on a single mainstream platform domain are hard to catch. Shoppers and automated fraud tools both rely on traditional signals like an unfamiliar URL or clunky design — signals these stores don’t trip. For merchants and platforms, the Myshopify findings point to a storefront-infrastructure problem. Ad platforms, payment processors, and consumer protection tools will need to address it before peak shopping volume hits in late November.
Source: Savi Security via GlobeNewswire