As your ecommerce business grows, brand protection becomes an important aspect of safeguarding your reputation and revenue. As more online scammers deploy sophisticated impersonation tactics—cloning websites, creating fake social media accounts, and launching fraudulent campaigns—ecommerce merchants face increased threats.
These scams not only hurt customer trust but also cause financial losses. With a solid brand protection strategy led by a professional service, you can detect and stop these threats before they damage your brand and customer relationships.
Here’s everything you need to know about using brand protection services to monitor the web for–and take down threats that could cost your customers their money and ruin your reputation.
What is Brand Protection?
Brand protection refers to safeguarding a company’s intellectual property, online presence, and customer trust by detecting and stopping fraudulent activities that impersonate the brand. As the internet and online sales have matured, so have the scams run by bad actors looking to make big money through brand impersonation/phishing scams.
These days, it’s imperative that you, as an ecommerce merchant, have some tools/services in place that can monitor and act on any suspicious activity regarding your brand name and identity to protect both your business and your customers.
Why Brand Impersonation is a Threat to Growing Businesses:
As your brand and company grow, so do the dollar signs in the eyes of online scammers who want to piggyback on your success and make money off your name and customers. Scammers will use impersonation tactics like cloning your website and social media pages and running fake ad campaigns to confuse your customers and increase the likelihood of them spending money in the wrong place.
Not only are these misled customers not getting the items they expect to receive in the mail, if they receive anything at all, but they also simultaneously get their credit card information stolen, leading to a double loss for consumers and your business.
Once a customer is scammed, they’re often lost to you for good, permanently tarnishing your brand’s reputation. This means that protecting your store from these cloning and phishing attacks needs to be something you do proactively rather than reactively if you want to keep your customers and digital assets safe. That said, protecting your brand from scams on your own is more complicated than you might think.
The Legal Landscape and the Brand’s Vulnerability
In terms of the legal landscape surrounding brand protection for ecommerce, you might be surprised to learn that there is often limited recourse for companies who have had their websites cloned in this way. In places like Canada, for example, brands face challenges holding scammers accountable as long as something is shipped, making it hard to stop the scam quickly.
Legal actions become challenging as long as these companies ship out something, fulfilling this shipping requirement. For example, they can mail counterfeit goods or even something small, like a button, when customers expect the coat they believe they got a good deal on.
This loophole allows fraudsters to operate longer, damaging the brand's reputation and causing customer dissatisfaction, even though the business itself isn't liable for the scam. The lack of clear, enforceable regulations to combat these tactics complicates matters further.
Think of it this way: these scammers are making so much money off businesses like yours that they can even invest in spoofed ad campaigns–sometimes even better looking or more expensive than your own–because they are both receiving money from misled customers and stealing their payment information. Because of this, they can easily afford the cost of shipping out packages containing counterfeit items and relatively cheap knick-knacks.
Types of Brand Impersonation
Generally, when we discuss ecommerce brand protection and digital risk protection, we are speaking about protecting your company from the following tactics:
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Web Fraud/Phishing Sites: Cloning websites and deceiving customers into buying from fake stores or giving out their personal/payment information. Scammers will then run ads pointing to these fake websites, furthering the illusion of legitimacy while listing your products at prices you could never actually afford to sell them for.
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Social Media Impersonation: Fake accounts on social platforms that mislead followers to cloned websites. Impersonators can also run ad campaigns through these fake pages to increase their reach and perpetuate the ruse.
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Online Scams: Broad scams that include fake giveaways, contests, or sales meant to deceive customers.
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Counterfeiting: Selling counterfeit products on another marketplace such as Aliexpress, Amazon, or Temu.
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Executive Impersonation: Pretending to be high-level employees or members of your C-suite online to mislead the public or misrepresent your business.
Good digital risk protection services should be able to monitor, prevent, and stop scammers from succeeding at all of these brand impersonation types, as each can be catastrophic for your business if not quickly dealt with.
How Brand Protection Services Work:
Online brand protection services work in two phases:
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Monitoring the web on your behalf: Domain registration is public record, and protection services monitor new registrations and associated IPs for suspicious activity. They will also track social media activity and online ads with specialized tools to learn if/when new accounts and campaigns pop up using your brand name and relevant info.
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Proactive shutdown of threats: With a database of known bad actors, including redundant servers, names, and credit cards, these services can predict and stop scams before they escalate. When threats are detected, the services take proactive action by initiating takedowns, issuing cease-and-desist orders, and collaborating with platforms like Google and Facebook to remove fraudulent ads, ultimately protecting your brand's reputation and revenue.
Many of these brand protection solutions will boast a 95%+ success rate in taking down fake domains and fraudulent ads on platforms like Google and Facebook, making them a great investment for any ecommerce business looking to monitor their digital footprint for any outliers.
The Power of Visibility:
Brand protection services give you visibility and real-time threat notifications so you can decide on a case-by-case basis how you would like to handle specific issues. Set them up to flag issues for your review or to begin the takedown process immediately upon identification, regardless of threat level or severity. This enables you to have immediate visibility into suspicious activity rather than having to seek it out on your own, potentially missing big threats.
Why You Should Use Brand Protection Services
The bigger your company gets, the more important this becomes. As a brand grows, so does its vulnerability to attacks. Scammers love to prey on success, as the more popular you are, the more money is available for them to steal.
While you might feel you can handle your brand protection strategy, there are two major reasons to use a digital risk protection (DRP) service:
1 - Better Connections to Those in Power
If you’ve ever been an “average Joe” needing help from someone at Meta or Google, you know that getting in touch with the right people isn’t always a walk in the park. Thankfully, this isn’t something you’ll have to worry about when you use a brand protection service that, by nature, already has pre-existing relationships with these companies, ensuring quick action to remove fraudulent ads and get pages and accounts shut down.
Similarly, they can also quickly initiate cease and desists with domain registrars for website takedowns as they are well known to these companies, understand the process, and can easily contact the right people to take quick action on your behalf.
2 - Saving your Brand’s Reputation
Since these protection tools can monitor new domain registrations and their IP addresses while maintaining a database of the servers, names, addresses, credit card numbers, etc. that these scammers use, they will usually learn of potential attacks on your brand before any damage is done.
Identifying possible vectors of attack ahead of time prevents these bad actors from completing their scams and gaining access to your potential customers, ultimately saving their wallets while leaving your brand reputation intact. Remember, once a customer is scammed, the likelihood of them ever interacting with your brand severely decreases. It's best to stop these scams before they happen in 100% of cases.
Conclusion
Brand impersonation is a growing threat that can wreak havoc on your ecommerce business. While legal liability might be limited, the impact on customer trust and your brand's reputation isn’t.
A proactive approach through brand protection services is essential to safeguard your business from scams, protect customer relationships, and maintain your competitive edge. By integrating these services into your operations, you can prevent potential threats and ensure your brand continues thriving without unnecessary interruptions or losses.
Looking for more information on these kinds of services or want some advice on getting started? Let’s get in touch!
