Key takeaway: Generative AI has turned fake-store creation into a volume game rather than a one-off con, and scammers are now reaching shoppers through emerging, largely unmonitored channels like AI shopping assistants — a gap most brand-protection programs haven’t closed heading into the holidays.
Savi Security’s free consumer scam-checker Scamwise reports that generative AI now lets scammers mass-produce convincing fake storefronts faster than merchants have seen before. Holiday-themed fake stores alone have jumped 5x in the past 60 days.
Consumers are now flagging a new fake online store roughly every three minutes — about 500 a day. That figure comes from a holiday fraud report that Savi Security, the company behind Scamwise, released on October 20, 2026.
The report attributes the jump to generative AI. These tools let scammers spin up polished, brand-mimicking storefronts in minutes instead of days.
Myshopify.com is the most abused domain in the dataset. Shopify assigns this subdomain by default to new stores before a merchant buys a custom domain. The report found that scammers abuse myshopify.com more than they abuse fake listings on Amazon, Etsy, eBay and Walmart combined.
Scamwise traced at least one in five fake stores back to ads on a major platform. It named Meta and Google as scammers’ preferred ad channels overall. Scamwise also said scam listings have begun appearing in results that AI shopping assistants generate — a channel most brand-protection programs don’t yet monitor.
Why it matters: Scammers who build fake storefronts on a trusted platform’s own subdomain make them harder for shoppers, and for automated fraud filters, to tell apart from early-stage legitimate stores. That pressures payment processors and dispute teams heading into the holiday shopping season. A mass-produced storefront may stay live only long enough to collect a handful of orders. Fraud filters often can’t flag it in time, letting scammers outpace typical detection cycles. Scam listings reaching shoppers through AI shopping assistants add a channel that falls outside most current brand-monitoring programs.
Source: GlobeNewswire