SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESS Newswire / September 9, 2025 / 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.
"Retailers are navigating some of the most complex email infrastructures of any industry - from third party logistics updates to loyalty programs to marketing automation," said Al Iverson, Industry Research and Community Engagement Lead at Valimail. "That complexity creates opportunity for attackers. If your domain can be impersonated, your brand can be hijacked."
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.
"Reputation damage from spoofing doesn't show up as a single incident," Iverson added. "It builds quietly - in consumer mistrust, ignored messages and declining click-through rates. The difference between losing trust at the inbox and keeping it is DMARC at enforcement."
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.
About Valimail
Valimail is the global leader in Zero Trust email authentication and invented hosted DMARC in 2015 and DMARC-as-a-service in 2021. In use by 80,000 companies globally, the company's full line of cloud-native solutions authenticate sender identity to stop phishing, protect brands, and ensure compliance. From neighborhood shops to the world's largest brands, many organizations use these solutions to secure their emails. Valimail holds the most robust portfolio of 20 patents that unlock DMARC for businesses at scale and is the only DMARC solution to earn FedRAMP authorization. Valimail employees Chair and co-Chair many critical ecosystem bodies, such as the IETF DMARC Working Group, and the AuthIndicators Working Group developing BIMI. The premier DMARC partner for Microsoft 365 environments, Valimail also holds leadership positions on every key industry standards body, driving today's email authentication policies and tomorrow's cybersecurity advancements for everyone. For more information, please visit www.valimail.com.
Media Contact
Escalate PR for Valimail
valimail@escalatepr.com
SOURCE: Valimail
View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire:
https://www.accessnewswire.com/newsroom/en/computers-technology-and-internet/retailers-face-rising-threat-of-ai-powered-email-scams-new-report-1070504
