Valentines: A Season of Love and Fraud

As Valentine’s Day 2026 comes around with warm expectations of love, thorny scams are on the rise. 

Threat actors have already laid their baits promising “great deals” on last minute gifts.

“Seasonal lures remain a reliable tactic for scammers, especially when they promise luxury gifts or limited-time Valentine’s offers,” says Pieter Arntz, Senior Malware Intelligence Researcher at Malwarebytes. 

“Treat unsolicited promotions with caution and avoid clicking through shortened links you do not recognise.

“Recent telemetry shows multiple reports tied to a ‘Dior Prestige Valentine’ phishing lure, all pointing to the same URL shortener, locrek[.]com.

“The landing page is currently down and we have not yet recovered the original email, but the clustering indicates coordinated activity. We are monitoring for new infrastructure and additional samples.”

Fake dating sites and Valentine’s day domains

Research from Check Point revealed a 44% jump in fake Valentine's Day domains registered in January 2026 compared to December 2025. 

Check Point also caught an additional 152 domains that appeared in just the first five days of February 2026 that were built around search terms like 'Valentine’s Day gifts' or 'cheap Valentine deals' to lure those last minute shoppers. 

One such example is a website called funkovalentine[.]club which featured a “fully designed e‑commerce layout, product categories, pricing, checkout pages and attractive though suspiciously broad merchandise”.

Researchers at Check Point also found 710 replicas of major dating sites like Tinder. 

“Cybercriminals create fake identities on dating sites and social media using psychological manipulation to convince victims to send money,” says Konstantin Levinzon, Co-Founder of Planet VPN.

“They are increasingly relying on generative AI tools to make their scams more convincing. 

“With AI enabling the creation of fake images and videos with just a click, users should be particularly cautious.” 

When Valentine's Day becomes a business risk 

Hackers generally don't break in, they log in.

This means that much of enterprise security risks arise outside the corporate perimeter.  

Valentine’s Day themed phishing campaigns could likely compromise legitimate marketing or email vendors thereby allowing them to send messages that appear legitimate. 

The day of love is also particularly attractive for ransomware gangs as organisations will have fewer people on call considerably decreasing response times. 

Romance scams: 'deepfaking' love 

Threat actors and scammers are on the lookout to leverage AI and deepfakes to make their scams increasingly sophisticated. 

A report from the US Federal Trade Commission estimated that romance scams in the US alone cost users more than a billion dollars, and this was back in 2023.

Technology now has advanced way beyond then and so has attack density and sophistication. 

“Hackers see massive opportunity in events like Valentine’s Day.” says Steve Bradford, SVP EMEA at SailPoint.

“They know thousands of people will be looking for connections and are more likely to ignore red flags once emotionally invested.

“While consumers are increasingly scam-aware, the emergence of deepfakes, which are learning from human behaviour all the time, mean bad actors have become particularly adept at posing as real people. 

“We can’t afford to get complacent. Fabricated voice messages, stolen images and even sophisticated video calls can be more convincing than you might think and create the impression you are speaking with another human being.”