Festive ad fraud puts brand trust and marketing returns at risk

Every festive season, the story is much the same. Brands flood digital platforms with offers, consumers hunt for deals, and fraudulent ads, fake storefronts and suspicious links find their way into the mix. Ad fraud remains one of digital marketing’s biggest challenges, even as brands ramp up festive campaigns to chase clicks, conversions and sales.

For example, a skincare ad may appear like any other festive promotion. The creative is polished, the product looks promising and the offer seems genuine. Nothing on the screen raises an immediate red flag. Yet, such ads raise a familiar question: how easily can a convincing advertisement blur the line between a genuine offer and a potential trap? For brands, the consequences can extend from wasted media budgets to customer complaints and lost trust.

The trust deficit behind festive shopping

The risks grow as consumers move between social media, marketplaces and brand websites in search of festive offers. Harish Kumar, CEO of Quick Heal Technologies, a cybersecurity software company, said the surge in online shopping and promotional campaigns creates opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit consumer trust. Fraudulent advertisements, cloned brand pages and fake discount websites can look legitimate enough to deceive shoppers.

The scale of the wider cyber threat offers some context. Quick Heal’s India Cyber Threat Report 2025 recorded 369.01 million malware detections across 8.44 million endpoints in India, averaging 702 detections every minute. Android malware accounted for 42% of the reported Android detections.

The tactics often rely on urgency rather than technical sophistication alone. Limited-period deals, cashback offers and exclusive rewards can prompt shoppers to click before checking where a link leads. Kumar said fraudsters also use phishing pages to steal login credentials, banking information and personal data, while some impersonate customer support representatives to solicit one-time passwords or persuade users to install malicious applications.

For consumers, the immediate risk is financial or personal-data loss. For brands, the damage can extend to credibility and customer confidence, even when the fraudulent promotion has no connection to the company itself.

When a fake listing becomes a brand expense

For consumer brands, impersonation brings costs that sit outside conventional advertising budgets. Monitoring suspicious listings and pursuing takedowns require resources, while customer support teams must respond when shoppers question whether an offer or product is genuine.

Dheeraj Bansal, Managing Director at Recode Studios, an online beauty & cosmetics store, said the company had identified fake promotions, fraudulent websites and unauthorised brand impersonation during recent festive campaigns. “Of the instances identified, 50% were escalated for takedown,” he said. The company estimated a 26% impact on customer complaints, sales or campaign performance, although the figure combines several outcomes rather than specifying a single measurable effect.

The burden can be substantial for brands dealing with impersonation across multiple online channels. Aniket Aggarwal, Deputy Manager, Ecom, Maliao Cosmetics, said the company had identified approximately 150 suspected cases of brand impersonation and issued takedown notices for more than 500 fraudulent listings and websites.

Aggarwal put the estimated investment in customer support, takedown efforts and ongoing monitoring of suspicious marketplace activity at ₹24 lakh. He also said the fraudulent activity affected sales and marketing operations as well as customer support, resulting in estimated potential losses of ₹2 crore.

For brands, the challenge does not end when a listing is removed. They must also address the uncertainty left behind: whether customers have been misled, whether a purchase has been lost and whether the experience will affect their willingness to buy from the brand again. Brand protection, in this sense, becomes an operational cost of competing in digital commerce.

The problem with buying performance

Brand impersonation can sometimes be traced to a fake website or listing. Advertising fraud is harder to identify because the activity can appear legitimate in campaign dashboards, where clicks, installs and conversions are used to judge performance.

Saurabh Khattar, Country Manager, India, Integral Ad Science (IAS), a digital ad technology and media measurement company, said the changing pattern of digital discovery has made the quality of customer acquisition as important as its scale. For direct-to-consumer brands, consumers now discover products across social platforms, marketplaces, quick commerce and physical retail, increasing the number of environments in which marketing activity must be evaluated.

The pressure to demonstrate returns is particularly acute during the festive season. According to IAS India festive research, 86% of Indian consumers plan to increase their festive shopping budgets, 84% expect to do most or all of their shopping online, and 83% say mobile will be their primary shopping device. “The demand is enormous, but so is the pressure on marketers to prove every rupee spent is working,” Khattar said.

Yet a rise in digital activity does not necessarily translate into genuine consumer interest. IAS’s 21st Media Quality Report found that fraud on non-optimised campaigns had reached a four-year high globally, Khattar said.

The company’s Threat Lab has also documented how sophisticated fraudulent traffic can imitate human behaviour. Its Papyrus investigation uncovered mobile fraud mimicking clicks, scrolling and attention. “Fraudulent traffic recorded a nearly 25x higher click success rate and 13% higher attention scores than non-Papyrus traffic,” Khattar said.

A separate Genisys investigation identified a fraud network spanning 25 million devices and nearly 500 AI-generated domains. The network used techniques such as app identity spoofing to conceal the origins of fraudulent traffic.

The implications go beyond money spent on invalid activity. If fraudulent traffic enters attribution systems, it can make poor-quality inventory appear effective, distort customer acquisition costs and influence where future budgets are allocated. “A click is not necessarily a customer. An install is not necessarily intent. And a conversion signal is only valuable if you can trust what sits behind it,” Khattar said.

“For D2C brands, ad fraud is ultimately not a media problem; it’s a growth problem. If you can’t trust the customer behind the conversion, you can’t trust the ROI.”

The gap between clicks and conversions

For advertisers, the challenge is to distinguish genuine demand from a spike in activity that may not translate into sales. Akshay Chaturvedi, CBO, VDO.AI, said brands should question sudden increases in clicks when conversions do not rise at a comparable pace.

“The biggest mistake advertisers make during festive sales is assuming that more activity means more demand. When clicks spike, the instinct is often to increase budgets. But if conversions are not rising at the same pace, marketers need to question what is driving that traffic before putting more money behind it,” he said.

Chaturvedi said VDO.AI’s Festive Consumer Index 2026 found that 47.1% of consumers discover festive brands on social media, while 38% identify connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) platforms as the advertising environments they trust most.

“These findings highlight different roles for each channel, not the superiority of one over another. For advertisers, the question is how to connect discovery with trust and, ultimately, purchase intent and measure each channel against the outcome it is expected to deliver,” he said.

That distinction matters because fraud and ordinary media wastage require different responses. Fraudulent impressions need to be detected and verified. Impressions served to genuine consumers may still be wasted through irrelevant targeting or excessive frequency, requiring better planning and optimisation.

“Treating both as the same problem will not solve either,” Chaturvedi said. “Before asking how much more to spend, brands should ask a harder question: how much of the activity they are paying for is contributing to a genuine business outcome?”

For marketers, cybersecurity and brand protection can no longer sit apart from the customer experience. The cost of festive ad fraud extends beyond a wasted campaign: it can undermine consumer trust and send future media budgets towards activity that looks effective on a dashboard but delivers little genuine value.