Cyber Monday has become one of the biggest online shopping days of the year, and like most things that involve a lot of money moving around quickly, it’s also become one of the biggest days of the year for scams. While your team is fielding orders, checking email, and juggling a busier-than-usual inbox, cybercriminals are counting on exactly that kind of distraction to slip something past you.
This isn’t meant to put a damper on the holiday shopping season — it’s simply worth knowing what to watch for, so a busy week doesn’t turn into a costly one.
The good news is that most of these scams follow familiar patterns once you know what to look for, and a few simple habits go a long way toward keeping your business safe during the rush.
What This Could Mean for Your Business
Scammers tend to lean heavily on urgency and volume during this time of year. A fake shipping notification, a spoofed order confirmation, or an email that looks like it’s from a familiar vendor asking to “update payment details” before a holiday deadline — these all rely on people moving quickly through a full inbox without stopping to double-check. During a normal week, someone might pause and look more closely. During a hectic shopping season, that pause is exactly what gets skipped.
The financial risk is real, but there’s also a time cost that’s easy to underestimate: even a scam that doesn’t succeed can eat up hours of your team’s time sorting out what’s legitimate and what isn’t, right when everyone can least afford the distraction. And for businesses that do their own online selling, there’s an added layer — fraudulent orders and chargebacks tend to spike during this period as well.
What a Good Solution Looks Like
None of this requires your team to become suspicious of every email that lands in their inbox during November. A few practical habits cover most of the risk:
- Verify unexpected payment or account-detail change requests through a separate, known channel before acting on them
- Hover over links before clicking to see where they actually lead, especially in emails about orders or shipping
- Use email filtering and security tools that catch a lot of these attempts before they ever reach an inbox
- Keep a healthy skepticism toward urgency — legitimate businesses rarely demand immediate action with no room to verify
Layered together, these habits catch the overwhelming majority of scam attempts without slowing your team down or requiring anyone to second-guess every normal email that comes through.
It’s also worth remembering that scammers don’t need to fool everyone — they only need one distracted moment out of hundreds of emails your team handles that week. That’s exactly why layered protections matter more than individual vigilance alone; even a well-trained, careful team benefits from technology quietly catching what a busy human might miss.
Businesses that sell online face an additional wrinkle during this period: a spike in legitimate-looking but fraudulent orders, often placed with stolen card information. Having clear procedures for reviewing unusual orders — especially rush shipping requests or first-time customers placing unusually large orders — can prevent a good chunk of holiday-season chargebacks before they happen.
If your team handles a lot of customer-facing email during the holidays, it can also help to designate one person as the point of contact for anything that seems even slightly off. Having a clear, low-pressure way to say “can someone double-check this?” removes the awkwardness that sometimes keeps people from flagging a suspicious message in the first place.
At the end of the day, a busy shopping season and a secure inbox aren’t mutually exclusive. With a few reasonable habits and the right tools quietly working in the background, your team can move through a full November without treating every email as a potential threat.
A quick internal reminder to your team — even a two-line message the week before Cyber Monday — can be enough to keep this front of mind without turning it into a bigger production than it needs to be.
How We Can Help
At North Star, we help Denver-area businesses set up email security and filtering that quietly catches a lot of this activity before it ever becomes a decision your team has to make. We’re also glad to run a quick refresher for your team ahead of the holiday season, so everyone’s on the same page about what to watch for during the busiest weeks of the year.
A little preparation now tends to make the rest of the season noticeably calmer, since your team can move through a full inbox with confidence instead of second-guessing every message.
If you’d like a hand getting ready for the holiday shopping rush, we’d be glad to help. Reach out through our contact page or call us at 303-552-0018. Our phishing guide walks through fake shipping notices, spoofed vendor emails and payment-change requests, and it is free to share with your team.
