San Francisco, CA: April 10, 2026 – Online shopping has never been easier, and for fraudsters it has never been more profitable. According to Pew Research Center's April 2025 survey, about one in three US adults (36%) has been the victim of an online shopping scam. Within that group, 31% say they paid for something that never arrived and 17% received a counterfeit product and could not get a refund.
The trend is not limited to retail sites. In 2025, almost 30% of the people who told the US Federal Trade Commission they lost money to a scam said the first contact happened on social media. Those losses came to roughly USD 2.1 billion, which made social platforms the most costly way for scammers to reach a victim.
For brand owners, each of those transactions is a customer who believed they were buying from you. A cloned storefront, a counterfeit listing or a fake ad does lasting damage to trust long after the sale.
“Shoppers do not separate the fake from the real brand. They remember who they thought they were buying from, and that is you,” says Daniel Hartley, Chief Revenue Officer at MarkScout.
The most effective response is early detection across marketplaces, social media, paid ads and look-alike domains, paired with fast, evidence-based takedowns. MarkScout monitors all of these channels together so that each case can be linked back to the same seller or network.