- Vacation emails often hide scams that steal personal and banking information
- Bulk marketing messages are used to hide fraudulent financial requests
- Redirect chains collect increasingly sensitive identity information 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, through ForcePoint, recent scam campaigns rely on messages that look like ordinary holiday promotions or order notifications rather than obvious phishing attempts.
These emails seem routine enough to escape the scrutiny of recipients faced with cluttered inboxes.
Marketing emails designed to appear legitimate
Many fraudulent messages travel through bulk email systems that mirror standard commercial email campaigns.
Formatting is generally clean, lightly marked, and free of common spelling or grammatical errors.
Tracking links and unsubscribe options appear in messages to reinforce the impression of legitimate marketing activity.
This design allows emails to bypass basic spam detection systems that rely on older threat models.
When recipients click on embedded links, the messages redirect them to a series of pages that appear to be related to seasonal financial deals.
The interaction usually begins with neutral questions, such as requested loan amounts or basic eligibility details.
As the process continues, the forms request increasingly sensitive information, including personal identifiers, employment history, income details and banking credentials.
After users submit information on the initial site, the feed often redirects them to additional financial-themed pages.
These secondary sites request similar data and promote other loan-related offers, increasing their exposure.
This structure allows fraudsters to reuse collected information while pushing victims to share even more details across multiple domains without realizing the larger pattern.
Another group of campaigns targets business recipients by masquerading as DocuSign document notifications and order confirmations.
The emails claim that festive purchases or wine orders require verification, using DocuSign branding to build credibility.
Any links in these messages pass through an independent hosting infrastructure before leading to credential collection pages that target corporate email logins.
Malware removal tools offer limited protection against these scams because the attacks rely on data collection rather than malware installation.
How to stay safe
- Check sender domains carefully and treat unexpected or incompatible addresses as untrusted until independently confirmed.
- Examine link destinations before clicking, especially when emails refer to documents, loans or holiday purchases.
- Access financial and document services directly through official websites instead of using built-in email buttons.
- Use identity theft protection tools to monitor suspicious activity and alerts about compromised personal information.
- Use antivirus software as a supporting check, not as a primary defense against phishing-based attacks.
- Slow down usual email processing during high volume periods and check messages before interacting.
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