As phishing scams become more sophisticated and harder to detect, a new analysis from Valimail, the leading provider of email authentication and anti-impersonation solutions, reveals that retail brands are among the top targets. They are increasingly attacked not only for fraud, but for brand impersonation campaigns that erode consumer trust and open the door to disinformation.
In the past year alone, Valimail blocked over 123 million suspicious emails, highlighting the scale of attempted brand abuse aimed at customers’ inboxes. These are no longer the clunky, obvious attacks of the past. They’re clean and well-crafted, designed to replicate the tone, design and cadence of trusted retail brands. The goal is often to get customers to click, share credentials or even unknowingly spread misinformation.
While many retailers have taken steps to implement email authentication protocols the report shows that significant gaps remain:
- Even though 95% of retail domains have a DMARC record in place, many aren’t enforcing it. Nearly 30% still use a policy that effectively does nothing.
- 6% don’t receive any reporting at all, leaving them blind to how their domains are being used or misused.
- If new sender authentication requirements from Gmail, Yahoo! and Outlook were fully enforced today, 3 million retail emails would be blocked for failing compliance.
- Despite these gaps, the report notes a 40% year over year increase in BMI adoption in the retail sector – a sign that more brands are looking to protect both security and visual trust in the inbox.
Valimail’s findings underscore a key shift: email security is no longer just about fraud prevention – it’s brand protection. In an era when AI can mimic tone, logos and layouts with alarming accuracy, authentication tools like DMARC and BMI are among the few tools that give brands control over who can send on their behalf.
Valimail offers free resources for organizations to check the protection status of their email domains through the Valimail Domain Checker, allows companies to explore and provides DMARC reporting visibility through its Monitor solution.
The full “2025 Winning (and Keeping) Shopper Trust – The Retail Email Threat You Can’t See” report can be accessed here.
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This entry was posted on September 10, 2025 at 8:32 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Valimail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Retailers Face Rising Threat of AI-Powered Email Scams, New Report From Valimail Warns
As phishing scams become more sophisticated and harder to detect, a new analysis from Valimail, the leading provider of email authentication and anti-impersonation solutions, reveals that retail brands are among the top targets. They are increasingly attacked not only for fraud, but for brand impersonation campaigns that erode consumer trust and open the door to disinformation.
In the past year alone, Valimail blocked over 123 million suspicious emails, highlighting the scale of attempted brand abuse aimed at customers’ inboxes. These are no longer the clunky, obvious attacks of the past. They’re clean and well-crafted, designed to replicate the tone, design and cadence of trusted retail brands. The goal is often to get customers to click, share credentials or even unknowingly spread misinformation.
While many retailers have taken steps to implement email authentication protocols the report shows that significant gaps remain:
Valimail’s findings underscore a key shift: email security is no longer just about fraud prevention – it’s brand protection. In an era when AI can mimic tone, logos and layouts with alarming accuracy, authentication tools like DMARC and BMI are among the few tools that give brands control over who can send on their behalf.
Valimail offers free resources for organizations to check the protection status of their email domains through the Valimail Domain Checker, allows companies to explore and provides DMARC reporting visibility through its Monitor solution.
The full “2025 Winning (and Keeping) Shopper Trust – The Retail Email Threat You Can’t See” report can be accessed here.
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This entry was posted on September 10, 2025 at 8:32 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Valimail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.