Cyber Week Fraud Isn't Waiting for Black Friday Anymore

For years, retail fraud and risk teams have built their Cyber Week playbooks around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Those days still matter, but they no longer tell the whole story when it comes to Cyber Week fraud risk.

It turns out that the risk window is getting wider, with fraud activity beginning to tick up earlier in the season. It's also becoming more concentrated during lower-traffic hours and around larger attempted fraud transactions.

At Accertify we recently analyzed 576 million retail and retail marketplace transactions representing $73.1 billion in value across five consecutive Cyber Week seasons from 2021 to 2025. What we found was that the fastest-growing volume isn't happening on the marquee days at all. Instead, transaction volume on the Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving has climbed 61 percent and 66 percent since 2021, respectively, nearly double the growth rate of Black Friday (39 percent) and Cyber Monday (37 percent). Weekend volume also grew 57 percent. As a result, the share of Cyber Week business happening before Thanksgiving increased from 21.8 percent in 2021 to 24.2 percent in 2025. For fraud teams, that means a growing share of the activity they need to protect is happening before the traditional Cyber Week rush even begins.

Fraud Targets the Bigger Basket

The data also reinforces a pattern that has held steady for half a decade. Attempted fraud consistently targets larger transactions than legitimate shoppers place. Across the five years studied, the average attempted fraud transaction ran 1.9 to 2.3 times the size of the average legitimate order. That gap reached a five-year high of 2.33x in 2025. This was driven by legitimate baskets shrinking, from $133 in 2021-2023 to $115 in 2025, while attempted fraud transactions remained comparatively large. For security teams, this means review thresholds calibrated to a "typical" order size risk missing the transactions carrying the greatest dollar exposure.

The Overnight Hours Are the Riskiest, Not the Quietest

One of the clearest patterns across all five years emerges overnight, when legitimate transaction volume drops but fraud activity remains elevated. Between roughly 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. CST, only about 8 percent of transactions occur, but they account for more than 14 percent of attempted fraud. The pattern continues across the broader window from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Less than 13 percent of transaction volume occurs during those hours, but they account for nearly 20 percent of attempted fraud. The overnight fraud rate has run 1.7 to 2.4 times the midday rate every year since 2021. In dollar terms, the gap is even starker, with fraud representing close to 2 percent of overnight transaction value vs. less than 1 percent during the day. Fraud activity, it appears, doesn't keep retail hours. Even as legitimate shopper traffic falls overnight, fraud remains disproportionally active.

A Longer Season, Not Just a Busier Week

The same front-loading and overnight patterns show up in the full month leading into Thanksgiving, not just the seven-day Cyber Week window, suggesting retailers face a longer readiness season than the calendar implies. Across the five years studied, individual days in the weeks before Thanksgiving saw transaction volume grow anywhere from 30 percent to 88 percent. Fraud was disproportionally concentrated overnight, with rates running 1.9 to 2.7 times the midday rate.

Taken together, the data points to a practical shift in how retail risk and fraud teams should prepare for the upcoming holiday season. Monitoring needs to begin earlier into November, overnight hours should be treated as an active risk window rather than downtime, and review strategies should account for transaction value rather than simply order count. Black Friday and Cyber Monday will remain two of the biggest days on the retail calendar. However, the data suggests that fraud teams can no longer afford to build their Cyber Week strategies around those two days alone.

Erin Dorshorst is head of corporate and portfolio marketing at Accertify, a global leader in digital risk management.