Holiday fraud and bot traffic: what practitioners need to act on

TL;DR: Holiday fraud is moving earlier and becoming more automated, according to Kasada, with attackers pre-positioning configs, scaling account takeover and gift card abuse, and using agentic AI to blur bot and human traffic. The boundary between fraud operations and security controls is collapsing, so teams need earlier monitoring, API-layer defences and shared fraud-security telemetry.

Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Kasada: “Holiday Fraud Trends 2025: 4 Cyber Threats to Watch This Season”.

By the numbers:

• Kasada says genAI traffic is predicted to grow 520% in the 10 days leading up to Thanksgiving.
• Kasada observed a 92% increase in malicious configurations targeting retail between January and October 2025.
• Kasada observed a 400% increase in malicious configurations targeting accommodation between January and October 2025.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when fraud controls are too rules-based during seasonal shopping spikes?

A: Rules-based fraud controls lose accuracy when peak traffic changes the normal behaviour baseline.

Q: Why does account takeover risk rise before Black Friday?

A: Because compromised accounts are most valuable before peak shopping days, when they still hold payment methods, loyalty points, carts and gift card value.

Q: What are the signs that bot mitigation is failing against agentic AI?

A: The usual markers become less reliable.

Practitioner guidance

• Start fraud monitoring two weeks earlier Baseline legitimate traffic before mid-November so you can spot pre-event validation, scraping and login anomalies before the holiday surge begins.
• Harden account login controls for high-risk sessions Use adaptive MFA and device-aware anomaly detection for logins tied to new devices, automation or repeated credential abuse.
• Defend checkout and inventory APIs directly Apply authentication, rate controls and anomaly scoring at the API layer because many bots will bypass the browser entirely.

Bottom line: Holiday fraud now starts before the peak sales window, so teams that wait for event-week spikes will miss the preparation phase.

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