35% of Brits would give up online shopping over fears of identity theft, a new report has found.
With news headlines dominated by stories of cyberattacks on major brands and retailers – Asahi, Land Rover Jaguar, M&S, Harrods – a striking 73% of British consumers are more concerned about fraud and identity theft than they were five years ago, according to Ping Identity’s 2025 Consumer Report. Their research found that online retail was one of the least trusted sectors for protecting personal identity (20%), beaten only by social media (36%) and online banking services (24%).
The growth of AI and agents is a significant factor in this erosion of consumer trust. With LLMs increasingly built into retail operations, and influencing every stage of the customer journey, the report’s findings highlight growing demand for stronger authentication measures and policy change. 66% of Brits believe government regulation of AI is important to safeguarding their personal identity online.
“Consumer confidence in brands is eroding as we enter a ‘trust nothing’ era fueled by AI-enabled fraud,” said Darryl Jones, Vice President of Consumer Segment Strategy at Ping Identity. “AI and the rise of agents is compounding the attack on trust, making threats more persuasive and harder to detect, which raises the stakes for identity verification and protection.”
Reputational damage
This new research dovetails with recent findings into how cyberattacks can cause lasting reputational damage for brands. Analysis by media monitoring and intelligence firm CARMA found that 89% of the media coverage of the recent Jaguar Land Rover attack was negative. “Since the incident started to come to light on 2nd of September, we’ve tracked almost 8,000 articles generating an estimated 820 million views,” said Nathan McHugh, associate account director at CARMA. “Scale alone doesn’t tell the full story. Most of the coverage (89%) carries a negative sentiment, reflecting the mounting pressure on the company.”
“The broader narrative isn’t just about Jaguar Land Rover – other brands are finding themselves dragged into this conversation too, with negative mentions in coverage extending to M&S, Co-op, Harrods and even Salesforce,” he added. “This highlights a critical vulnerability in reputation management: even when a company has seemingly moved past its own crisis, that breach resurfaces whenever a similar incident hits another organisation. This compounds reputational damage indirectly, as each new cyberattack reopens old wounds and reinforces the narrative that these companies remain vulnerable.”
For online retailers, AI is undoubtedly as much of a challenge as an opportunity – and the 2025 Consumer Report starkly highlights the difficulty of building AI into operations while simultaneously protecting the business and its customers from threat actors. The possibility that 35% of Brits would give up online shopping over fears of identity theft represents a serious issue for the sector.
Regaining consumer trust
The 2025 Consumer Report does, however, offer some insight into how brands can maintain consumer trust – through strong and visible cybersecurity. Biometric authentication (27%) and text/email prompts with one-time log in (27%) are the top features that would increase UK consumers’ trust in online brands. “The brands that will thrive are the ones that make trust their top priority through stronger authentication, AI-transparency, and identity-first security,” Darryl Jones said.
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