From First Click to First Fraud Attempt: Why October Is Prime Time for Abuse

Fraud rehearses quietly before its biggest performance.

Every October, inboxes and ad platforms start to hum. Budgets open up, test campaigns launch, and holiday acquisition begins in earnest. It’s the month of preparation for the upcoming busy season. Underneath, it’s something else entirely: a playground for fraud.

For retailers, October is a warm-up lap. Creative gets tested, customer segments are refined, and loyalty pushes begin. But for fraudsters, it’s the perfect rehearsal space. Defenses might not be at full strength, campaigns are shifting quickly, and anomalies are easier to dismiss as “seasonal noise.” October is when fraud begins to take shape, and by the time the real spending hits in November, the damage has already been set in motion.

October: The Quiet Stage

Fraud doesn’t come with a soliloquy; it slips in quietly. A burst of clicks from an unfamiliar domain. A handful of signups tied to disposable emails. A test purchase here and there that doesn’t raise any alarms. On their own, these things can feel like the background noise of a busy season. Together, they’re the opening notes of a pattern that builds momentum as the holidays get closer.

And that’s what makes recognizing fraud so tricky… it exists in this ephemeral state. Not loud enough to demand attention, not big enough to be obvious. Just quiet enough to blend in with the noise of normal campaign activity, until suddenly, it isn’t.

Research backs this pattern. Integral Ad Science found that ad fraud rates jump by 67% between October and December compared to the rest of the year. In North America, bot-based fraud more than doubled in the second half of 2024. And Pixalate’s 2024 benchmarks showed 21% of programmatic mobile app traffic was invalid in Q4, with spikes beginning in October.

October isn’t quiet time for fraud, it’s just working backstage.

How Fraud Builds Momentum

Think of fraud as a rehearsal process.

• First clicks and signups: Low-volume probes from bots and synthetic identities measure what your system allows through.
• Learning the rules: Fraudsters watch how attribution credits conversions, how coupon codes are validated, and where friction exists.
• Small-scale fraud events: Test purchases and fake loyalty enrollments happen under the radar.
• Full-scale execution: By November, fraudsters know the script. They ramp volume when legitimate traffic peaks, making it harder to distinguish signal from noise.

By the time your team spots the spike, the patterns were set weeks earlier.

Why It’s Overlooked

October suffers from a perception problem. It doesn’t carry the urgency of November’s shopping days, so anomalies are written off as testing artifacts.

A new traffic source with suspiciously high clicks? Probably just early optimization.

A coupon code is used a dozen times in 24 hours? Maybe a popular influencer post.

But ignoring those signals is exactly how fraudsters establish footing. According to the IAS Threat Lab, fraud rates during the holiday period (October through December) were 67% higher than in the rest of the year, proof that what looks like seasonal noise in October is often the start of something bigger.

Preparing Before the Peak

The companies that avoid the worst losses treat October as the opening of fraud season, not just the marketing season. It’s the month where small rehearsals determine how the full performance will play out in November and December. Fraudsters are testing. The question is whether you’re testing, too.

• Validate identities at the first click. October is when fraudsters flood forms with disposable emails and synthetic identities, hoping to slip into your database unnoticed. AtData’s risk score lets you catch those weak signals immediately, weeding out noise before it affects your holiday performance.
• Watch for clustering and velocity. What looks like a surge of interest may just be the same actor signing up again and again. With our network effect, you can spot these patterns in real time to prevent the kind of account farming that scales dangerously by November.
• Stop promo and coupon abuse before it snowballs. Fraudsters start before Black Friday to run their scripts, testing which codes work, how many times they can be reused, and whether referral programs can be gamed. SafeToTrust keeps October’s quiet probes from turning into December’s problem.
• Protect the guest checkout. It’s one of the easiest places for fraud to hide, especially early in the season when teams may not be on high alert. By analyzing the email address tied to each guest transaction in real time, AtData helps retailers separate genuine buyers from high-risk attempts without adding friction for customers.
• Use October to set baselines. Fraud in November often looks “normal” only because teams failed to define normal early on. With AtData’s activity and reputation signals, October becomes the month to establish benchmarks, so when fraudsters push harder later, their patterns stand out against the groundwork you’ve already laid.

In Closing

Fraud in Q4 shouldn’t be treated as the inevitable cost of doing business in the busiest season of the year. It doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Its starting now, quietly shaping the campaigns and budgets that follow.

The question isn’t whether fraud will surface in November. It’s whether you caught the first click in October that signaled it was already here.

AtData helps teams separate real customers from disposable attempts at the very start of the funnel. Because the best way to stop holiday fraud is to block it before it ever takes root.

Stop fraud before it snowballs.

Learn how AtData can help.