Cyber Monday, established in 2005, is the Monday following Thanksgiving Day in the USA and is dedicated to discounts on technology and electronic products, therefore it has become, together with Black Friday, an unmissable event for all those who hunt for discounts and various offers. This year, Cyber Monday – whose name recalls the fact that discounts apply mainly to e-commerce – falls today, December 1, 2025. In this in-depth analysis we will analyze the genesis of this anniversary, born not so much from a predefined marketing strategy but from a technical need of consumers in the early 2000s, linked to the speed of Internet connections in the workplace compared to those at home. In addition to seeing when and why Cyber Monday was born, we will also provide you with some tips to avoid trap offers, i.e. those that could hide a real scam.
Cyber Monday was established 20 years ago: how it came about
The expression “Cyber Monday” was officially coined in 2005 by Ellen Davis of National Retail Federationthe trade association of U.S. retailers. Scott Silverman, head of Shop.org, highlighted how a 2004 research indicated the Monday following Thanksgiving as one of the busiest days for online shopping, historically the twelfth in terms of business volume.
The idea behind this phenomenon, as also reported by New York Times in that period, it was linked to a specific infrastructural limitation: millions of workers, after having spent the weekend looking at the windows of physical stores without purchasing, took advantage of returning to the office on Monday to complete their online purchases to take advantage of high-speed Internet connections, which were much more efficient than domestic networks, which were very slow and unreliable at the time.
If Black Friday is historically associated with the chaos of physical stores, long queues and sometimes episodes of tension among the crowd, Cyber Monday has evolved like its digital counterpart, further benefiting from the push given by the COVID-19 pandemic which has acted as a driving force for the world of e-commerce. To be honest, Cyber Monday was the first attempt to establish a day dedicated to digital purchases. Tony Valado, working for the 1800Flowers.com portal, had already tried to launch “White Wednesday” in 2003, positioning it the day before Thanksgiving, but without achieving the global success that Cyber Monday would later have.
How to avoid scams disguised as offers on Cyber Monday
Although the event itself is legitimate, the enormous volume of transactions inevitably attracts cyber criminals, who see such initiatives as potentially attractive opportunities to conclude their deals to the detriment of the unfortunate victims. Here are 3 tips to avoid scams disguised as offers during Cyber Monday.
- Purchase only from reputable retailers. This is the first prerequisite for avoiding scams and scams. During these events dedicated to discounts, unknown sites proliferate that promise unlikely discounts.
- Be careful of fake web addresses. Make sure the connection is protected by the HTTPS protocol, recognizable by the padlock icon in the address bar, which guarantees communication encryption. Fraudsters, in fact, usually register domains that are extremely similar to the official ones, perhaps modifying a single character or the final extension of the site (for example, using “.shop” instead of “.com”). Learning to recognize an unsafe site is one of the most important defense strategies.
- Analyze the communications that are delivered to you online. If you receive promotional links via email, SMS, social media, instant messaging, etc., do not open them. That seemingly harmless link could conceal an attempt at phishing, a well-known technique in the IT sector perpetrated by cybercriminals to extort sensitive data by posing as reliable entities via emails that simulate problems with an order or urgent offers. It is necessary to carefully analyze the sender and, above all, avoid scanning QR codes of uncertain origin, as they could redirect to malicious sites in a variant of the scam called “quishing”.
There would be much more to say about the defense strategies to adopt to avoid online scams in this period. The ones we have provided are, in fact, basic indicators. If you want some other specific suggestions on how to avoid the most common online scams, consult our in-depth analysis.
