Mother's Day has long been one of the most anticipated dates in retail. It's also, as the data shows with increasing clarity, one of the most anticipated by cyber criminals.
In 2025, the retail and e-commerce sector was the most targeted industry for digital threats, with more than 1.2 million incidents identified by Axur, including over 21,000 phishing pages. In April 2026, the picture intensified: the daily average of incidents jumped to 297.47, a 124.26% increase compared to March of the same year. May isn't over yet, but the historical pattern already shows where this curve is heading.
This article examines what the data reveals about digital fraud during the Mother's Day season, which threat vectors are growing, how cyber criminals build their campaigns, and what retail companies need to monitor to protect their brands.
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Seasonal dates like Mother's Day create a convergence of conditions that favor digital incidents. Online shopping volumes rise, consumers are actively searching for deals, and the emotional weight of the occasion lowers the critical guard of anyone who receives a message or sees an ad.
That environment is predictable, and threat actors plan accordingly. When a consumer sees a paid ad for perfume at 60% off, "today only," the combination of urgency, emotional appeal, and a familiar brand identity in the creative is enough to generate clicks. The difference is that, in these cases, the click leads to a scam.
Three factors make this period particularly high-risk for retail brands.
The first is manufactured urgency. Fraudulent campaigns intentionally use time-limited messaging like "flash sale," "today only," and "limited stock" to pressure quick decisions and bypass consumers' natural caution.
The second is the volume of legitimate communications. During the Mother's Day season, consumers receive dozens of emails, messages, and ads from real brands. That context raises tolerance for unexpected communications and makes it much harder to distinguish what's real from what isn't.
The third is emotional appeal. The occasion carries an affective weight that increases engagement with any related offer. A promotion that will "make your mom happy" resonates differently than a generic discount, and cyber criminals know this.
April 2026 brought a volume of digital threats significantly above historical levels. The daily average of Mother's Day-related incidents reached 297.47, up from 132.65 in March, a 124.26% increase. For context: that same indicator stood at 137.19 in April 2025 and 207.05 in April 2024. The 2026 jump represents a 116.71% increase over the prior year.
What's driving that growth is almost entirely one vector: malicious ads. In March 2026, the daily average of ADS-type detections was 32.9. By April, it reached 185.8, a more-than-fivefold increase in a single month. Fake social media profiles and phishing pages also grew during the period, but at a much smaller scale.
This concentration has a direct implication for brands: cyber criminals are investing in paid traffic to distribute scams. That means the threats appear on the same platforms where legitimate brands advertise, occupy prominent positions in feeds and search results, and reach consumers who weren't drawn in by a suspicious link, but by an ad that looked completely normal.
One of the clearest ways to track how early cyber criminals prepare is by monitoring the emergence of URLs containing Mother's Day-related terms. Axur's data shows a consistent pattern over the past three years.
In 2024, just three URLs with those terms were identified in March. By April, that number jumped to 33. In May, it peaked at 117. In 2025, the pattern repeated: 31 URLs in April and 83 in May. In the remaining months of the year, those terms are nearly absent, typically between zero and five occurrences per month.
The most common terms in these URLs include variations like "mothers," "mothersday," and "motherday," combined with recognizable brand names and words like "quiz," "kit," "store," and "deal." The presence of "quiz" and "kit" alongside cosmetics and fragrance brands points to a specific behavior: threat actors simulating gift promotions or survey-based giveaways to lure victims into submitting personal data or making payments.
What this pattern reveals is that malicious infrastructure starts being built weeks in advance, taking advantage of the pre-purchase window to maximize exposure time. By the time the date arrives, the fake sites and ads are already indexed, distributed, and live.
The rise of malicious ads deserves specific attention. Unlike email phishing, which depends on the victim opening a suspicious message, fraudulent ads appear proactively: in social media feeds, in paid search results, in content apps.
The operational logic is straightforward: cyber criminals create accounts on ad platforms, set up campaigns with creatives that imitate recognizable retail brands, and direct traffic to fraudulent pages. The platform then delivers that content to the brand's audience, including people who engage with it regularly. For the consumer, the experience is indistinguishable from a legitimate ad.
The product categories most frequently exploited tend to be the ones with the strongest appeal for Mother's Day: cosmetics, fragrances, footwear, apparel, home appliances, furniture, flowers, and experiences like travel. These are products with strong emotional association to the occasion and price points high enough to make the advertised discounts believable.
A trend observed over recent cycles is the use of automated content creation tools to produce fraudulent pages with a professional look. Rapid website development platforms are being used by cyber criminals to generate dozens or hundreds of pages in a short time, each with the layout, images, and copy that imitate legitimate brands.
The practical effect is a significant reduction in both the cost and the execution time of scams. What once required considerable technical skill to build a convincing page has become accessible to threat actors with far fewer resources. This partly explains the ongoing year-over-year growth in seasonal URL volumes.
The increasing use of alternative TLDs, particularly .app, adds a layer of perceived credibility. Domains with less traditional extensions convey a sense of modernity that can increase consumer trust, while slipping past filters configured to block more common extensions associated with fraud.
Given this landscape, continuous brand abuse monitoring has become an operational necessity. Exposure windows are short: fraudulent pages are typically created days before the seasonal peak and taken down shortly after, and creation volumes are high enough that manual approaches quickly lose effectiveness.
A specific challenge with this type of threat is that many fraudulent pages and ads don't directly mention the brand name. They reproduce the logo, color scheme, visual style, and brand language, but avoid exact text to bypass keyword-based filters. Detecting these cases requires visual analysis, not just text matching.
Axur monitors more than 40 million new URLs daily in the data lake and uses Clair, its proprietary AI model, to inspect and enrich each signal. Clair analyzes image, text, and page structure together, identifying brand abuse even when there's no direct mention of the company's name. That's the type of detection that traditional text-matching providers can't deliver.
For retail security and fraud prevention teams, effectiveness comes down to response speed. One major retailer uses the Axur platform to remove more than 12,000 threats per year. The takedown process runs automated 24/7, with notification initiated in under 4 minutes of detection and a median resolution time of 9 hours, with a guarantee that content stays down for at least 15 days.
Based on the patterns from 2024 and 2025, May is when seasonal Mother's Day incident volumes peak. In 2024, seasonal URL detections hit 117 in May, four times the April volume. In 2025, the ratio was similar. With April 2026's daily average already well above prior years, the data indicates that incident volumes over the next few weeks will be significant.
For retail brands, the period between the last week of April and the second Sunday of May carries the highest exposure. That's when threat volumes are at their peak and consumers are most actively searching for deals, which both amplifies the reach of scams and magnifies the reputational damage for brands used as bait without their knowledge.
Seasonal digital threats share a consistent profile: fast creation, high volume, and a short exposure window. That profile favors whoever detects first. Brands that continuously monitor the digital environment can trigger the removal of fraudulent content before it reaches scale and gets in front of unsuspecting consumers.
For consumers, the main advice is to be skeptical of deals with discounts well above market rates, especially when they arrive through social media ads or messaging apps. Checking the page's domain before entering any information is a simple habit that significantly reduces risk.
For companies, the starting point is mapping the most critical channels: which product categories are most frequently imitated, which platforms concentrate malicious ads, and which terms are appearing in URLs exploiting the brand name. That data builds the foundation for a faster response and for protecting the customer trust built over years.
Want to learn how Axur monitors and removes digital threats for retail brands? Talk to one of our specialists.
What is malvertising in the retail context?
Malicious ads are paid campaigns set up by cyber criminals on legitimate advertising platforms, including social networks and search engines, to promote fraudulent pages. They imitate the creatives of well-known brands to attract consumers and direct them to fake sites where personal data or payments are captured.
Why is Mother's Day high-risk for digital fraud?
The combination of high online shopping volumes, the emotional weight of the occasion, and urgency-driven offers creates conditions where scams can go unnoticed. Consumers are more receptive to brand communications and less likely to question the authenticity of offers arriving through familiar channels.
How do I know if my brand is being used in digital fraud?
Continuous monitoring of domains, ads, and social media profiles is the most effective way to identify brand abuse in real time. Specialized tools like the Axur platform track millions of URLs daily and detect content that imitates brands even without a direct mention of the company name.
What is a takedown and how does it protect retail brands?
Takedown is the process of removing fraudulent content that abuses a brand's identity. Axur automates this process end-to-end: detecting the threat, drafting and sending notifications to hosts and platforms, tracking responses, and closing the case once the content is removed, all with minimal human intervention and a median resolution time of 9 hours.