Black Friday Sale 2025: Retailers across fashion, beauty, and skincare like H&M , DECATHLON, NYKAA, & others have announced their Black Friday 2025 sale periods, promising some of the steepest discounts of the season.
Once a US tradition, Black Friday has now become a major shopping event in India, attracting budget-conscious and younger shoppers. As winter approaches, global and Indian brands are gearing up for one of the biggest retail weekends of the year.
Black Friday is a yearly shopping event that signals the start of the holiday buying season. It occurs on the Friday immediately after Thanksgiving in the United States, which falls on the fourth Thursday of November. Due to attractive deals and discounts, Black Friday has also gained significant popularity in India, with major retailers such as Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, along with various online platforms and physical stores, offering enticing promotions
While the deals are tempting, shoppers must remain vigilant as scammers use this time to target potential victims. Cybersecurity experts are urging people to be extra cautious and protect their personal and financial information.
One of the most prevalent Black Friday scams involves the rapid proliferation of spoofed online storefronts that closely replicate major retailers. Leveraging fake trust badges, familiar site templates, holiday-themed designs, and countdown timers, these fraudulent sites are engineered to appear nearly identical to legitimate ones.
These fraudulent sites capture payment details and personal data as soon as shoppers try to check out, often lured in by abnormally steep discounts.
Consumers should stay alert for signs such as:
Discounts in the 70–90% range that seem too good to be true
Aggressive countdown timers pushing urgent purchases
Misspelled or odd-looking URLs
Fake trust badges or seals
Checkout pages that redirect to unfamiliar domains
Generic, copy-and-paste website templates reused across multiple “stores”
A lack of legitimate customer support or verified contact information
Delivery scams also rise during this season as more people shop online. Scammers pretend to be major courier companies and try to fool people into giving away their personal information. They often contact victims saying their password has been exposed or that they need to reset it because of a supposed cyberattack.
Scammers frequently design fake retailer deals and surveys to steal personal details. Refrain from interacting with suspicious links, and verify any promotions by checking the retailer’s official website. As a best practice, click on links only when you are confident they come from a genuine and reliable source.
With the help of advanced AI models, scammers can now create highly realistic videos that fuel Black Friday shopping scams across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
These videos often promote fake deals or products, directing shoppers to fraudulent websites designed to steal personal and financial information. By combining AI tools with resources from the dark web, scammers can target far larger audiences than traditional, more limited phishing attacks.
