2.4 lakh fraudulent cases targeted India’s leading bank during festive season, uncovers mFIlterIt
India’s festive shopping rush has a dark twin. As shoppers hunt for deals, a fast-moving network of fake websites, phishing pages, impersonation accounts and bogus offers hunts for them, using trusted brand names to get to their wallets. New findings from digital trust and ad-fraud intelligence platform mFilterIt show how large that network has become. They also show why shopper awareness alone cannot stop it, and why brands must go after the scam infrastructure itself.
In a brand protection engagement with a leading Indian bank, mFilterIt’s OSINT-led (Open-Source Intelligence) monitoring uncovered 2.4 Lakh fraudulent cases across just 10 platforms, all targeting a single brand. That works out to nearly 24,000 scam assets per platform, covering brand impersonation, fake promotional sites, phishing pages, coupon abuse and deceptive referral schemes. If one brand faces a threat this big, every brand running festive campaigns in India should ask how exposed it is.
mFilterIt took down 2 Lakh+ of these cases, a success rate of over 97%. The data also shows that speed decides the outcome. 80–85% of the scam assets were removed within 24 hours of detection. That means roughly 1.85 to 1.96 lakh fake offers; cloned sites and phishing links were dismantled before they could reach customers at scale. During the festive season, every hour a scam stays live is another hour it can collect customers’ passwords, payments and trust.
Lost money is only part of the damage. Fraudsters take over a brand name and the trust its customers place in it, and when a scam works, customers usually blame the brand, not the fraudster. The brand ends up paying for a crime it never committed. Every takedown, mFilterIt notes, is one less trap that a customer has to spot on their own.
Amit Relan, CEO & Co-Founder, mFilterIt said, “Festive fraud is not a handful of rogue links. It is infrastructure, built to scale and timed to strike when customers are least on guard. Awareness campaigns and complaint-driven, reactive handling start the clock only after someone has already been harmed. Independent OSINT-led monitoring and digital crawling start it the moment a threat appears.
They continuously scan platforms, spot patterns and remove scam infrastructure at scale. This matters most during the festive rush, when traffic, offers and fraud all peak at the same time. Brands that are not actively hunting these threats are leaving their customers exposed.”