TL;DR

Dozens of small food and craft traders have received convincing emails that impersonate UK food festivals, with payment requested only after several rounds of friendly correspondence, a BBC Wales investigation has found. Festival organisers and UK Finance say generative AI has removed the usual warning signs, although the BBC notes there is no conclusive proof AI was used.

How the scam works

The emails carry real festival branding, and in some cases the names of real staff. The BBC has seen versions impersonating events in Narberth, York, Ludlow, Mold, Newport, St Fagans, Broadmead and the Forest of Dean.

Harriet Thomas, who runs knitting workshops and had applied to Abergavenny Food Festival in past years, paid for what she thought was a stand. The messages addressed her by name, knew the site layout, and used a Jotform booking form of the kind traders fill in routinely. “Nothing sparked a red flag,” she said. She only realised after the real festival posted a warning. Another local business paid £400 and bought in stock before discovering the fraud; Abergavenny found it a discounted pitch.

Why organisers point at AI

Andy Fryers, who coordinates the Abergavenny event, said the volume and credibility of fake approaches had made this year “much more difficult”. His view is that anyone can now use a chatbot to compile lists of local traders, scrape a festival website and draft plausible correspondence in minutes, cheaply and at scale.

Giles Mason, who runs UK Finance’s Take 5 to Stop Fraud campaign, said the spelling and grammar errors that once gave scams away have gone. He argued that fraudsters target sole traders and volunteer-run events precisely because banks have hardened their own systems.

Report Fraud, which covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland, recorded a 395% rise in AI-linked reports in 2025-26 against the previous year.

The small-business angle

This is the pattern Resultsense has tracked in other sectors: AI does not create a new type of fraud so much as make an old one cheap to personalise. The property sector is facing the same shift with forged documents. For small firms the defence is procedural rather than technical. Competitive booking windows push traders to pay quickly, which is exactly the pressure a scam exploits.

Looking forward

Mason’s advice is the one that holds: if an approach arrives unprompted, pause, then reach the organisation using the details on its official website rather than replying. Festival organisers, many of them volunteers, may need to publish their genuine booking channels more prominently and confirm payment details independently, since a lookalike email address is no longer a reliable tell.