Digital trust platform reports over 97% takedown success, with 80–85% of fraudulent assets removed within 24 hours of detection.
NEW DELHI (India CSR): India’s festive shopping season brings a surge in digital offers, consumer engagement and online transactions. However, it also creates a major opportunity for fraudsters who misuse trusted brand names to target customers through fake websites, phishing pages, impersonation accounts, misleading promotions and deceptive referral schemes.
New findings from digital trust and ad-fraud intelligence company mFilterIt highlight the alarming scale of this challenge. During a brand-protection engagement involving a leading Indian bank, the company’s OSINT-led monitoring reportedly identified more than 2.4 lakh fraudulent cases across 10 platforms, all impersonating or misusing the identity of a single brand.
The scale of the findings underlines how festive fraud is no longer limited to isolated scam links or occasional phishing messages. Instead, it has become an organised, technology-enabled network that can rapidly create, distribute and replicate fraudulent digital assets across multiple platforms.
On average, the monitoring exercise identified nearly 24,000 suspicious or fraudulent assets per platform. These included fake promotional websites, cloned landing pages, phishing links, misuse of coupon offers, false referral campaigns and brand impersonation attempts designed to exploit the trust customers place in established financial institutions.
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Scams Built for Scale
The festive period is especially attractive for fraudsters because consumers are actively looking for discounts, cashback offers, shopping deals, travel packages and financial benefits. In this high-traffic environment, a convincing fake offer can quickly attract clicks, collect personal information or redirect customers to fraudulent payment channels.
For brands, the concern goes beyond financial loss suffered by an individual consumer. Every successful impersonation attempt can weaken customer confidence, damage brand reputation and create long-term trust issues. Customers often associate a fraudulent offer with the brand whose name, logo or campaign language has been misused.
The findings show that brand protection must now be treated as a continuous responsibility rather than a reactive activity. Waiting for customers to report fake pages or fraudulent offers may mean that the scam has already reached hundreds or thousands of people.
mFilterIt said it successfully took down more than 2 lakh fraudulent cases, reporting a takedown success rate of over 97%. Importantly, the company noted that 80–85% of identified scam assets were removed within 24 hours of detection.
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Why Speed Matters
In digital fraud, time is often the most important factor. A phishing page that remains active for even a few hours during a major festive campaign can be shared widely through search results, social media posts, online advertisements or customer-to-customer messaging.
Quick identification and removal of fraudulent infrastructure can reduce the opportunity for fraudsters to capture passwords, banking credentials, payment details and other sensitive information. It can also prevent customers from being misled by fake offers that closely resemble genuine campaigns.
The mFilterIt findings demonstrate the importance of proactive monitoring. Rather than relying only on complaint-driven action, brands need systems that can scan the open web and digital platforms, identify suspicious patterns and initiate takedowns before a fraud attempt gains momentum.
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Beyond Consumer Awareness
Customer awareness remains important, especially during the festive season. Consumers must verify websites, avoid sharing banking details through unverified links and remain cautious about offers that appear too good to be true. However, awareness alone cannot solve the problem.
The responsibility must also rest with companies, platforms and digital ecosystem partners. A customer should not be expected to identify every fake website, impersonation account or phishing campaign independently. Strong monitoring systems, quick reporting channels and coordinated takedown mechanisms are necessary to protect people at scale.
From a responsible business perspective, digital safety is increasingly becoming part of customer care, governance and brand accountability. As digital transactions grow, companies need to ensure that their customers are protected not only through secure products and services, but also through timely action against misuse of their identity online.
Amit Relan of mFilterIt said, “Festive fraud is not a handful of rogue links. It is infrastructure, built to scale and timed to strike when customers are least on guard. Awareness campaigns and complaint-driven, reactive handling start the clock only after someone has already been harmed.”
He added that independent OSINT-led monitoring and digital crawling help identify threats as soon as they appear by continuously scanning platforms, recognising patterns and removing scam infrastructure at scale.
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A Safer Digital Ecosystem
The festive fraud challenge is a reminder that digital trust must be actively built and protected. For banks, e-commerce companies, consumer brands and financial service providers, every fake campaign left online can become a potential risk to customer relationships.
mFilterIt’s findings make a strong case for brands to invest in continuous monitoring, rapid takedown systems and stronger digital-risk intelligence. In a season driven by trust, offers and high consumer activity, protecting customers from fraud is no longer only a security function—it is a business responsibility.
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Founded in 2015, mFilterIt began by helping advertisers validate digital ad traffic, reduce media-spend wastage and strengthen trust in digital advertising. As digital risks became more complex, the technology-driven company expanded its work into brand protection and financial protection, helping businesses identify fraud, prevent impersonation and create safer digital touchpoints for customers. Its latest festive-fraud findings reinforce the need for organisations to treat digital trust as an ongoing business and customer-protection priority.
