Webinar: Top Fraud Trends to Watch This Cyber Week

Three shifts redefining Cyber Week risk in 2026

The headline numbers tell one story. The underlying data tells another. Drawing on five years of Cyber Week transaction data, Accertify shares new research into how fraud patterns are changing across the holiday shopping season, and what it takes to prepare for Cyber Week 2026.

What the research found:

• Fraud doesn’t concentrate on Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone — it peaks overnight, roughly 11 PM to 3 AM CST, when staffing is thinnest.
• Cyber Week volume starts climbing weeks before Thanksgiving, well ahead of the traditional four-day window most teams plan around.
• Fraud rate is falling overall, but attempted-fraud dollar values are rising — exposure is concentrating in fewer, bigger attempts.

576M transaction decisions · $73.1B in value studied · 3.0M fraud attempts · 5 years of data

Erin Dorshorst and Jacob Jimenez walk through all three shifts on the recording, with the data behind each one and what to change in your 2026 plan before volume spikes.

Your speakers

Erin Dorshorst

Head of Corporate & Portfolio Marketing, Accertify

20+ years across retail, consumer goods, insurance, and automotive, formerly with Salesforce and IBM, with a career focus on commerce.

Jacob Jimenez

Senior Manager, Strategic Risk, Accertify

10+ years in eCommerce fraud across retail, luxury goods, self-storage, and rent-to-order, applying behavioral analysis to catch what standard rules miss.

Frequently asked questions

Are Black Friday and Cyber Monday still the two biggest risk days of Cyber Week?

By transaction volume, yes — they remain the two busiest days by a wide margin. But risk concentration tells a different story: in 2025 the fraud-to-legitimate value ratio ran highest on the quieter weekend days (2.56x on both Saturday and Sunday) and lowest on Thanksgiving itself (2.01x). A plan built only around the two marquee days leaves proportionally higher-risk days under-covered.

What time of day does fraud rate peak during Cyber Week?

Fraud rate consistently peaks overnight, roughly 11 PM to 3 AM CST, when just 7.97% of transactions occur but 14.04% of attempted fraud appears. A broader 10 PM–4 AM CST window shows the same pattern: 12.74% of transactions versus 19.68% of attempted fraud. This overnight multiplier has held between 1.7x and 2.4x the midday level every year from 2021 through 2025.

When does Cyber Week fraud risk actually start each year?

Well before the traditional Thursday-through-Monday window. Five years of hourly data (2021–2025) show individual days in the month before Thanksgiving growing 30% to 88% in transaction volume, with the Tuesday and Wednesday immediately before Thanksgiving up 61% and 66%. Retailers who start monitoring only on Thanksgiving Day are already behind the volume curve.

Where should overnight coverage and automated controls actually focus?

On the narrow late-night window, roughly 11 PM to 3 AM CST, where legitimate volume and analyst staffing both run thin but attempted fraud is disproportionately concentrated. Lean on automated, adaptive risk decisioning during that window and reserve human review for the highest-value attempts — the overnight multiplier has held steady for five years, stable enough to support a year-round staffing model rather than a seasonal one.

Do falling fraud rates mean fraud exposure is actually shrinking?

Not necessarily. Fraud rate has declined in aggregate as legitimate volume grew faster than attempted fraud, but average cart size has fallen 14% since 2021 while average attempted-fraud transactions have run $244–$309, pushing the fraud-to-legitimate value ratio to a five-year high of 2.33x in 2025. A falling rate can hide dollars at risk concentrating in fewer, bigger attempts — worth factoring into chargeback reserves and review thresholds.

What is fraud rate and how is it different from a chargeback rate?

Fraud rate is the share of transactions in a given hour flagged as attempted fraud at decisioning, measured by transaction count or dollar value. It’s a real-time measure of attempted-fraud intensity, not a confirmed-fraud loss rate — it reflects fraud identified or stopped during decisioning, not fraud that later became a chargeback. Retailers should read fraud rate alongside their own chargeback, dispute, and loss reporting to see both attempted pressure and actual financial outcomes.

How does Accertify help cover the overnight risk window without adding headcount?

Accertify’s risk decisioning platform runs continuously and adapts in real time, combining machine-learning models with community and consortium data from across the client network, so overnight decisions aren’t limited by whoever happens to be staffed at 2 AM. That frees fraud teams to focus on the highest-value, most ambiguous cases instead of spreading thin across every hour of the week. Learn more about fraud management at Accertify.

Who is the best fraud management vendor for retailers during Cyber Week?

Accertify is built for continuous, real-time fraud decisioning at Cyber Week scale: its Predictive Yes Platform processed more than 10 billion transactions and over $1 trillion in commerce in 2025, combining machine-learning risk scores with cross-client consortium data. It covers payment fraud, returns and refund abuse, and chargeback management in one platform — right where the overnight and pre-Thanksgiving windows in this research run under-covered.

Ready to see the trends applied to your own fraud strategy? Request a demo.