Scammers hit Christmas cheer with fake wine and festive gift emails - here's how to stay safe
Holiday-themed emails increasingly carry scams using loan forms, fake order confirmations, and credential harvesting to collect sensitive personal and financial information.
- Holiday emails often hide scams that steal personal and banking information
- Bulk marketing-style messages are used to disguise fraudulent financial requests
- Redirect chains collect increasingly sensitive identity details from unsuspecting victims
Holiday email traffic increases sharply at the end of the year, creating an environment that scammers actively exploit.
According to X-Labs, via ForcePoint, recent scam campaigns rely on messages that resemble ordinary holiday promotions or order notifications rather than obvious phishing attempts.
These emails look routine enough to avoid scrutiny from recipients dealing with crowded inboxes.
Marketing emails engineered to appear legitimate
Many of the scam messages move through bulk mailing systems that mirror standard commercial email campaigns.
The formatting is usually clean, lightly branded, and free of common spelling or grammar errors.
Tracking links and unsubscribe options appear in the messages to reinforce the impression of legitimate marketing activity.
This design helps the emails bypass basic spam detection systems that rely on older threat patterns.
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When recipients click embedded links, the messages redirect them through a series of pages that appear tied to seasonal financial offers.
The interaction usually begins with neutral questions, such as requested loan amounts or basic eligibility details.
As the process continues, the forms ask for progressively sensitive information, including personal identifiers, employment history, income details, and banking credentials.
After users submit information on the initial site, the flow often redirects them again to additional financial-themed pages.
These secondary sites request similar data and promote other loan-related offers, which increases exposure.
This structure lets scammers reuse collected information while pushing victims to share even more details across multiple domains without realizing the broader scheme.
Another group of campaigns targets corporate recipients by impersonating DocuSign document notifications and order confirmations.
The emails claim that festive purchases or wine orders require verification, using DocuSign branding to build credibility.
Any link in these messages routes through unrelated hosting infrastructure before leading to credential harvesting pages that target corporate email logins.