Black Friday fraud: how to protect your operation

"Peak sales are also peak fraud" is not an exaggeration. It's a pattern that repeats itself year after year, with data showing exactly when and how criminals operate.

The day with the highest volume of fraud of the year is not just any day

On Black Friday 2024, November 29th was the day with the highest number of attempted frauds in Brazil. There were 32,400 intercepted digital scam attempts, based on the monitoring of 5.2 million transactions (Serasa Experian, via the Ministry of Communications). This is no coincidence: it's the same day when traffic, order volume, and pressure on checkout systems reach their peak for the year – exactly the scenario fraudsters seek to camouflage themselves among legitimate orders.

And this isn't a one-off problem, isolated to a single date. The volume of attempted fraud in the first quarter of 2025 was already 22.9% higher than in the same period of 2024, according to Serasa Experian itself. The curve has been rising all year; Black Friday only concentrates and highlights this growth.

Why this is a business problem, not just an IT problem

It's tempting to treat fraud as a purely technical issue: just another rule in the anti-fraud system, another filter in the authentication layer. But the real impact goes far beyond that.

• Money is taken directly from the cash register. Each approved fraudulent transaction represents a direct loss, whether through chargebacks or the merchandise that has already left the inventory.
• Customer data is exposed. A vulnerable environment during peak traffic is also a more vulnerable environment for data breaches, precisely when more people are sharing payment information.
• Reputation is tested at the worst possible time. A customer who suffers fraud, or whose purchase is blocked by a poorly calibrated security lock, associates that experience with the brand, not the fraudster.

In other words, a security incident on Black Friday isn't limited to the IT team. It reaches finance, legal, customer service, and the public perception of the company, all at the same time.

You may also be interested in: What is Penetration Testing and how does penetration testing help protect businesses?

The real challenge: distinguishing fraud from legitimate customers, in real time, during peak hours

What makes this problem difficult is not just the volume of attempts, but the context in which they occur. During the peak of Black Friday, legitimate and malicious traffic arrive together, within the same time window, with access patterns that may appear similar at first glance.

This requires a layer of security that works differently than the rest of the year:

• Robust authentication without excessive friction — MFA, Single Sign-On, and session controls that block unauthorized access without turning legitimate checkout into an obstacle.
• Zero Trust Architecture, where no IP or device is trusted by default, requires each connection to be validated before accessing the application and data environment.
• Monitoring and mitigating attacks in real time, including protection against automated attempts (bots) and attacks , which tend to intensify precisely during peak hours.
• Segmenting environments, isolating applications and data from each operation so that a vulnerability does not become an entry point for the entire ecosystem.

This type of architecture, advanced authentication, Zero Trust, and continuous monitoring of intrusion attempts, underpins environments like those operated by Skyone, designed to maintain a stable security barrier even when access volume skyrockets.

Read also: WAF, EDR and SOC/SIEM: understand the layers of protection that every company should have.

The first step is to understand where your operation is exposed

Security during a sales peak isn't something that can be resolved the day before. It needs to be addressed in advance, by clearly mapping out the points of greatest exposure before they are tested under the pressure of thousands of simultaneous transactions.

We've prepared a quick Black Friday preparedness survey, designed for infrastructure and security managers who need to know precisely where the main risks to their operations lie.

→ Answer the readiness survey now

You have 3 minutes to identify the points of attention before someone faster than your team finds them first.

Frequently asked questions about security and fraud on Black Friday

How many attempted frauds occurred on Black Friday 2024? According to Serasa Experian, 32,400 attempted digital scams were intercepted on November 29, 2024, the day with the highest volume of fraud of the year, based on the monitoring of 5.2 million transactions.

Is the volume of fraud increasing, or is it a one-off problem related to Black Friday? It's a growing trend throughout the year. The first quarter of 2025 already registered a 22.9% higher volume of attempted fraud than the same period in 2024, according to Serasa Experian.

Why is it more difficult to identify fraud during traffic spikes? Because legitimate traffic and fraud attempts arrive simultaneously, in large volumes, with access patterns that can resemble each other. This requires layers of authentication and monitoring capable of differentiating the two in real time, without disrupting the shopping experience of real customers.

What security measures are most relevant for peak periods like Black Friday? Multifactor authentication (MFA), Zero Trust architecture, continuous monitoring against automated and brute-force attacks, and environment segmentation are among the most important layers for reducing exposure during periods of high transaction volume.

Written by Skyone