19,260 Online Shops in Oman. Only 412 Are Verified Safe.

You have probably bought something from an Instagram shop in Oman: perfume, abayas, a phone case, maybe a birthday cake. Most of the time it arrives fine. But the Sultanate now has more than 19,260 licensed e-commerce activities, and as of August 2026 only 412 of those online stores carry the government's official "verified safe" badge. That gap sits right in the middle of a real problem: cyber fraud cases jumped 50 percent in just one year.

• 19,260 e-commerce activities are now licensed in Oman, built on 191 percent compound annual growth since 2020, largely driven by Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp sellers.
• Only 412 online stores have been verified through Maroof Oman, the Ministry of Commerce's official trust platform, as of August 2026.
• The Royal Oman Police recorded a 50 percent surge in cyber fraud cases in the first half of 2025, with e-commerce scams the leading category.
• Pages imitating online shops accounted for 48.5 percent of financial phishing attempts in 2025, according to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.
• Oman's National E-Commerce Plan is 86.7 percent complete, with 26 of 30 initiatives delivered, and a full rollout targeted for 2027.

The math that should worry every online shopper

Do the division and only about 1 in every 47 licensed online sellers in Oman has actually been checked and verified by the government. That does not mean the other 46 are scams. Most are ordinary small businesses selling perfume, clothes or home baking through a social media page, exactly the kind of hustle Oman Vision 2040 wants to encourage among young Omanis and small business owners. But it does mean that when you slide into a seller's DMs and transfer money for a dress you have never touched, you are almost always trusting a stranger with zero official verification behind them.

The number of licensed e-commerce activities has grown at a compound annual rate of 191 percent since 2020, according to Oman's Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion, and Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp are named as the main channels driving that growth in the ministry's own account of the shift. Verification has not kept pace with that boom.

Why the scam numbers are climbing so fast

The Royal Oman Police reported a 50 percent increase in cyber fraud cases in the first half of 2025 compared with the same period a year earlier, and officers named fake e-commerce advertisements, often offering products at unrealistically low prices, as one of the most common tricks: buyers pay a deposit or the full amount, then the seller vanishes according to the force's Directorate General of Criminal Investigation. Separately, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky found that pages imitating online shops made up 48.5 percent of financial phishing attempts detected in Oman in 2025, and that up to 80 percent of cyberattacks by online fraudsters targeting the country involved e-commerce scams per its 2025 threat data. None of this happens in isolation. It is riding on the same wave of digital payment adoption that has made Oman quietly stop using cash, and the same instant mobile transfers that made peer-to-peer payments jump 317 percent in a year. Paying a stranger for a dress is now a ten-second bank transfer, not a trip to a shop.

What Maroof actually does, in plain terms

Maroof Oman, reachable at maroof.om, is the Ministry of Commerce's answer to the trust problem. A seller applies with their commercial registration, the ministry checks that the licence, tax status and store details are genuine, and approved sellers get a verification badge and a public profile with customer ratings that shoppers can check before paying. It is a genuinely useful five-second habit: before you transfer money to an Instagram seller, search their store name on Maroof. If they are not listed, that is not automatic proof of fraud, but it is a reason to pay on delivery rather than in advance.

Who is actually building this, and on what timeline

This sits inside Oman's National E-Commerce Plan 2022-2027, run by the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion under five pillars: updating e-commerce law, digitising services, improving payment systems, strengthening delivery logistics, and raising public awareness. As of the end of 2025, the plan was 86.7 percent complete, with 26 of 30 initiatives delivered, including a 2025 push on payment-fee reviews and school curriculum content on digital commerce the ministry confirmed in its latest progress update. The remaining four initiatives, due by 2027, include a national digital skills programme, a national addressing system for deliveries, and an electronic identity-check system for online sellers, which should directly raise how many stores actually get verified.

Why this matters for ordinary Omanis

If you run a small online shop out of your bedroom, verification is free reputation: a badge that says you are real when a customer is nervous about wiring money to a stranger. If you are a shopper, especially a parent buying for your kids or someone sending money on behalf of an older relative less familiar with online scams, checking Maroof before you pay takes less time than writing the DM asking for the seller's bank details. And if you are one of the thousands of young Omanis building a business through Instagram, getting verified is not bureaucracy for its own sake; it is the difference between looking like one more anonymous seller and looking like someone a stranger can actually trust with their money. The technology to shop and pay instantly is already here. The technology to know who you are paying is still catching up.