For Houston retailers, e-commerce operators, restaurants, event venues, and any service business that scales up for the holidays, November and December are among the busiest months of the year for fraud.

The reasons compound: more transactions, more inventory, more temporary staff, distracted management, deadline pressure on customers, and attackers who specifically target the period because they know all of the above.

Here’s the checklist we run with our retail and service clients before peak.

Lock down POS and payment systems

  • Patch everything. POS systems, payment terminals, back-office computers. Critical updates current.
  • Confirm PCI compliance. If you take cards, PCI-DSS applies. Self-assessment questionnaire current. Network segmentation verified.
  • Verify your card processor’s anti-fraud rules are tuned for the volume increase. Default settings can either let fraud through or block legitimate sales.
  • Test the failover. If your primary internet drops on Black Friday, do your terminals fall back gracefully?

Onboarding temporary staff

  • Individual accounts for everyone. No shared logins. The audit trail matters more during peak than any other time.
  • Minimum required access. Temp staff don’t need access to historical data, customer databases, or admin functions.
  • Day-one security training. Even a 10-minute conversation about phishing, password handling, and what to do if something seems off.
  • Sunset access on a calendar. When the temp’s end date hits, access is removed automatically. Don’t rely on someone remembering.

Customer-facing fraud awareness

Holiday season scams targeting your customers can come back as chargebacks and brand damage:

  • If you have an e-commerce site, monitor for unusual order patterns (large orders to new addresses, multiple cards on one account).
  • If you use gift cards, monitor for the gift-card scam patterns (CEO-impersonation requests for gift cards remain incredibly common).
  • Train your customer service team on what to verify before refunds, especially for "I never received it" complaints from new accounts.

Employee fraud awareness

BEC and gift-card scams tend to spike in November-December. Reinforce:

  • No vendor banking changes processed without verbal verification to a known number.
  • No urgent gift-card requests fulfilled without verbal verification.
  • No wire transfers approved without a documented dual-control process.

Backup and continuity

  • Verify backups are working. Restore a sample file. Time it.
  • Document the holiday emergency contact list. If something goes wrong at 8pm on Black Friday, who do you call? Does your IT provider have holiday-season coverage?
  • Pre-stage spare equipment. A POS terminal that dies at peak is much faster to swap if you have a configured spare on the shelf.

Holiday-specific cyber insurance considerations

Some cyber policies have specific provisions for peak-season operations. Check:

  • Does coverage scale with transaction volume?
  • Are temporary employees covered for insider-threat scenarios?
  • What’s the after-hours / weekend claim response procedure?

What to do this week

  1. Walk the POS network. Patch level current? Segmentation in place?
  2. Document the temp staff access workflow. Onboarding, daily, offboarding.
  3. Send the "no vendor banking changes without phone verification" reminder to accounts payable.
  4. Test-restore a backup. Document the result.
  5. Verify your IT provider’s holiday coverage hours.

If you’d like a holiday-readiness check done for your Houston business, book a free discovery call. We do retail and service-business reviews ahead of every peak season.

Aspendora Technologies has provided cybersecurity and managed IT to Houston-area retailers, restaurants, and service businesses since 2010.