Gold Medal Scams and the Milan Cortina Games

With over 3 billion global viewers and 2 million attendees expected, the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics concentrate attention, emotion, and money at a global scale. Inevitably, fraud follows.

Fraud Landscape in Italy

Even without the Games, Italy is already facing a sharp rise in authorized fraud, driven primarily by manipulation-based scams. In 2023, losses from authorized fraud were reported to be 13 times higher than losses from unauthorized fraud, highlighting a shift away from technical compromise toward social engineering and coercion.

Explore the Fraud Landscape in Italy

Fraudsters are notoriously quick to exploit the Olympics and other high-profile sporting events, where scarcity, exclusivity, and pressure create ideal conditions for scams.

Those same dynamics also concentrate spending into a short, high-intensity window. To illustrate the magnitude of the event, analysis from Banca Ifis projects €1.1 billion in direct expenditure during the Games period, driven by hospitality, retail, food and beverage, transportation, and on-site visitor services. It’s little surprise that fraud groups worldwide compete to capture their share of the opportunity.

What fraud scenarios are emerging around the 2026 Milan Cortina Games?

Impersonation as the Primary Attack Tactic

Across nearly all Olympics-themed scams, impersonation is the common denominator. Whether through phishing sites, fake ticket portals, or payment redirection schemes, attackers rely on borrowed trust to convince victims to act. In Italy, impersonation scams already result in the highest average loss per victim at €3,010.

Attackers are expected to impersonate official Olympic channels, ticketing platforms, sponsors, athletes, and even friends or family members, aiming to extract credentials, payment details, or directly pressure victims into sending money.

Phishing Websites

Research from ZeroFox has already identified multiple domains linked to Olympics-themed phishing targeting the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics, highlighting early-stage infrastructure set up long before the Games begin. These domains closely mimic official Olympic branding, language, and geography, a common tactic used to build credibility and evade early detection.

Notably, at least one domain has already been observed hosting a login interface, indicating potential credential-harvesting infrastructure in place. Phishing campaigns like these are highly scalable and increasingly convincing, particularly as attackers use AI to rapidly generate realistic websites, emails, and messaging, making early-stage detection critical.

Ticket Scams

To reduce the risk of fraud, tickets for the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics are sold exclusively through the official Games website, with the official Olympics app serving as the authorized channel for ticket resale. Ticket resellers and brokers are not authorized, and under Italian law, selling tickets above face value is illegal. As a result, any tickets offered outside official channels should be treated as highly suspicious.

Despite these safeguards, ticket scams surged in the months leading up to the Games and continue to pose risk during the event itself. Fraudsters routinely exploit scarcity by advertising fake or non-existent tickets through social media, messaging apps, and counterfeit ticketing platforms, drawing victims into authorized payments that are difficult to reverse.

Accommodation Scams

Accommodation scams are particularly persuasive around major sporting events, where demand is high and supply is fragmented. This is especially true for mountain venues hosting events during the Winter Games, where accommodation options are limited and often fully booked months in advance. Rising prices further increase the appeal for fraudsters, as higher upfront payments create opportunities for significant financial gain.

Common tactics include copying legitimate rental listings and altering contact details so inquiries are redirected to the scammer rather than the real landlord. In other cases, attackers advertise properties that are not actually available (or do not exist at all) often pushing victims to secure bookings quickly through off-platform payments.

Business Email Compromise

Businesses connected to the 2026 Winter Games (including sponsors, vendors, hospitality providers, and service partners) are also likely targets of Olympics-related scams, particularly through business email compromise (BEC). According to analysis cited by Palo Alto Networks, about 76% of phishing incidents involve BEC, where attackers exploit trusted business communication channels.

In BEC attacks, fraudsters rely on socially engineered messages that appear to come from leadership executives, vendors, or trusted partners. These messages are designed to pressure recipients into approving fraudulent invoices, making unauthorized vendor changes, or bypassing established controls, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), often with significant financial and operational consequences.

Bogus Streaming Sites

Unofficial streaming sites offering “free” access to Olympic broadcasts are another well-established fraud vector around major sporting events. While positioned as a way to bypass official channels, these platforms often serve as distribution points for malicious ads, embedded scripts, and hidden downloads, exposing users to malware without obvious warning signs.

Beyond deceptive overlays and pop-ups, users may be silently redirected to malicious websites or tricked into installing browser plugins and media players that contain credential-stealing or remote-access malware. Similar risks apply to fake mobile applications impersonating official Olympic streaming or event apps, which may carry infostealers or other forms of malicious code.

In the context of the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, these channels represent a low-friction entry point for attackers, often preceding account takeover attempts or downstream payment fraud.

Why Olympics-Related Scams Challenge Banks

Olympics-related scams share several characteristics that make them particularly difficult for banks to detect and stop in time.

Surging Phishing and Impersonation Infrastructure

Fraudulent infrastructure is often the first building block of event-driven fraud. Impersonation websites are set up weeks or even months before the event itself, as observed by ZeroFox. These sites commonly mimic official Olympic branding and may include fake banking login pages designed to harvest credentials or stage later attacks.

For banks, this creates a familiar challenge: the fraud risk exists long before any transaction takes place. Protecting customer trust and brand integrity increasingly requires shifting defenses left. This means addressing phishing and impersonation infrastructure before it reaches customers or triggers authorized payments.

Social Engineering Spike

Fraudsters are increasingly targeting people rather than systems. Around the Games, nearly every surrounding factor works in their favor—the hype, inflated prices, fear of missing out, and a strong sense of urgency. For many visitors and fans, the challenge is compounded by operating in a foreign country and language, making them more susceptible to social manipulation.

When manipulation happens outside the transaction itself, prevention increasingly depends on helping customers recognize the scam while it is unfolding, not after the money has already moved. Tools that surface timely, contextual warnings and explain why something looks suspicious can create the pause needed to stop a payment before it’s irreversible.

Limited Time to Recognize and Intervene

The one-time nature of the Games means banks often have a single chance to intervene. Detection frequently hinges on one transaction, typically an authorized payment made by a manipulated customer paying for fraudulent tickets, accommodation, merchandise, or related offers. These scams are often “one-and-done” attacks—there is no pattern to observe, no second attempt to catch. It’s now or never to stop the transaction before the money is gone.

In this narrow window, real-time behavioral signals become critical. To effectively prevent scams emerging around the Olympics, banks need the ability to continuously assess device context, behavioral cues, transaction scoring, and threat intelligence throughout the session. This makes it possible to surface risk while there is still a chance to intervene, even when the transaction itself appears legitimate—as is often the case in authorized push payment (APP) fraud.

Malware Exposure as a Secondary Effect

Not all Olympics-related scams are designed to extract money immediately. In many cases, fraudulent campaigns aim to seed malware infections that enable follow-on fraud later. High interest in legitimate Olympic content (such as streams, schedules, ticket updates, or exclusive announcements) is frequently exploited by attackers to lure users to malicious links or sites. Simply engaging with malicious content can trigger silent malware downloads, credential theft, or device compromise.

Stopping this kind of malware requires looking beyond traditional antivirus tools. More effective approaches focus on how a customer actually interacts with their banking app. Subtle inconsistencies, like a payment being initiated without any corresponding user interaction, can reveal malware at work, even with sophisticated malware threats designed to evade traditional device security.

Elevated Risk Beyond Banking

Banks are not the only organizations exposed during the Games. Periods of intense engagement and betting activity also increase risk for online betting and gaming platforms, where threats such as bonus abuse, new-account fraud, and account takeovers tend to spike around major sporting events.

Behavioral intelligence plays a similar role here, helping platforms distinguish genuine users from coordinated abuse and manipulation.

 

Lessons from High-Pressure Events

Major sporting events like the Olympics compress attention, emotion, and spending into a narrow window—and fraud thrives in that pressure. For banks and digital platforms alike, success won’t come from tighter rules alone, but from seeing risk early, supporting users in the moment, and acting while there’s still time to stop the money. The Olympics-related threats are temporary. The lessons for fraud prevention are universal.