Asking an AI assistant to find a holiday bargain sounds convenient. Describe what you want, give it a budget, and let it handle some of the shopping homework. Unfortunately, that helpful recommendation could send you straight to a fraudulent store.
Norton is warning about that possibility alongside its new holiday scams report. In its announcement, the company describes a shopper who asked an AI assistant to find affordable alternatives to a designer leather jacket. Among the suggestions was a $279 jacket from a store Norton identified as fraudulent, presented alongside legitimate retailers without a warning.
Think about how that looks to someone trying to finish their holiday shopping. A business they have never heard of appears next to familiar retailers, with an AI assistant suggesting it as a place to spend money. The shopper still needs to investigate the seller, but the recommendation can make it feel like someone already did that work.
The full report adds some useful context. Among Americans who used an AI shopping assistant or agent, 56 percent said it recommended or completed a purchase from an unfamiliar retailer during the previous holiday season. An unknown business is not automatically fraudulent, but a recommendation alone gives shoppers little reason to trust it.
Meanwhile, 52 percent of Americans said they would be likely to notice if an AI-recommended website were fraudulent. That measures confidence rather than demonstrated scam detection skills, and the two are hardly interchangeable.
There are also limits to Norton’s jacket example. The announcement does not identify the assistant involved, and one recommendation does not establish how often AI shopping tools suggest fraudulent stores. It supports a reason to check their suggestions, rather than a claim that every assistant is routinely delivering customers to scammers.
Still, that warning comes as shoppers consider giving AI a role in their holiday purchases. Norton’s survey found that 42 percent of Americans plan to use a tool like ChatGPT for holiday shopping this year. Among the 83 percent who said they would use an AI assistant to shop, only 42 percent expressed confidence that it would recognize and avoid a fraudulent website.
In other words, people are willing to get shopping help from software they do not necessarily trust to screen out scams. That leaves a fairly important part of the transaction up to the person holding the credit card.
Unfortunately, some shoppers apparently suspect a seller is trouble and buy anyway. According to Norton, 35 percent of Americans said they have purchased from a website or seller they thought might be a scam because the deal was too good to pass up.
Among Gen Z respondents, that figure reached 49 percent. A bargain is apparently a powerful thing, even when your own judgment is telling you to close the tab.
The survey also found that 16 percent of US adults reported having been scammed while holiday shopping online. Among those victims, 88 percent said they lost money. For those who lost money, the average loss was $394.
That does not mean one in six Americans has already been scammed during the 2026 holiday shopping season. The US survey ran in September and asked about holiday shopping experiences, rather than counting confirmed fraud cases from the upcoming shopping rush.
Separately, Norton’s parent company, Gen, says its brands blocked nearly 25 million attempted visits to fraudulent shopping sites in the last month. Those are blocked visits across its products, not 25 million individual victims or successful scams. The number describes activity its security tools encountered, which is a different measure from the survey responses.
Norton has something to sell here, of course. Its announcement promotes Norton Genie and Norton 360 as ways to help identify scams, so readers should understand that the research also serves a commercial purpose. Dynata conducted the US online survey on Gen’s behalf among 1,000 adults from September 10 through September 21, with results weighted by age, gender, and region.
The useful takeaway does not require buying another security subscription. Treat an AI recommendation as a starting point, then check the retailer yourself. Look for independent information about the business, examine the actual website address, and do not let a countdown timer rush you into paying.
There is nothing wrong with wanting help finding a gift or saving a few dollars. But an AI assistant recommending a store does not guarantee that the business deserves your money, and a tempting price does not make a suspicious seller any less suspicious.
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