Holiday shopping season gives online card fraud more places to hide

Online shoppers spent 6.8% more from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31, 2025 than a year earlier, according to Adobe Analytics. J.P. Morgan says that rush also helps fraudsters. More orders mean more noise, and odd activity is harder to spot. For anyone who sells online, the challenge is to stop bad orders without turning away good customers.

Why busy weeks help thieves

The main worry for online sellers is card-not-present fraud. That means someone uses stolen payment details when the physical card is not shown, as in any online purchase. The order itself can look completely ordinary, which makes it hard to tell apart from a real sale.

During peak weeks, a sudden jump in transactions makes unusual behavior harder to isolate. Staff also have less time to look into each questionable order. J.P. Morgan notes that certain card networks blocked more suspected fraud globally over the 2025 Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend than in the same period a year earlier.

Forms the fraud can take

• Stolen cards used to buy goods online.
• Card testing: bursts of small purchases to see if stolen card numbers still work.
• Dispute abuse that appears after an order has shipped.

The article also says AI can make fraud easier to automate and scale. At high volumes, that activity can blend in with normal shopper behavior.

What the losses look like

The FBI reports that credit card fraud caused $282 million in losses in 2025. Non-payment and non-delivery scams caused more than $503 million. The agency also notes that complaints often rise in the early months of the year, which suggests a link to holiday scams.

For sellers, costs can linger. Chargebacks, where a customer disputes a charge, mean teams must gather documents and answer within network deadlines. Card-testing attacks can add processing costs and may lead to network monitoring, chargebacks and potential fines.

The cost of being too strict

Locking everything down is not a clean fix. Overly strict rules can cause false declines, where a legitimate purchase is rejected as suspicious. That lowers the authorization rate, the share of transactions approved. A shopper who is wrongly declined may give up on the purchase and think less of the store.

What merchants can do

J.P. Morgan points to a more targeted approach. Extra scrutiny goes where risk is higher, and low-risk orders move through with less interruption.

• Use several checks together instead of one rule or one threshold.
• Look at customer, payment and transaction patterns for context.
• Adjust controls during the season, since a pattern that looks odd in October may be normal on a big shopping weekend.