In 2022, ecommerce sales surpassed $1 trillion – a record-breaking year – and nearly 40 percent of those ecommerce sales took place via mobile devices. As we know, the pandemic changed consumers’ shopping preferences, accelerating the shift to online shopping. This continued rise indicates that the change might be permanent.

Meanwhile, fraudsters also shifted with the changing consumer habits. Ecommerce fraud cost merchants and brands just over $41 billion in 2022. What’s more, the increase in digital interactions between brands and consumers set the stage for more online brand impersonation, involving bad actors creating fake websites, deceptive social media profiles, or rogue mobile apps masquerading as those of the trusted brand.

By exploiting the brand’s reputation, the fraudster seeks to trick consumers into divulging sensitive identity, payment, or account information. In other cases, the fraudster will engage in what the FBI refers to as non-delivery fraud, in which victims believe they’re paying for genuine goods from a brand, but those goods never arrive.

Consumer brands need to upgrade their online brand protection strategies to find and mitigate these spoofs to safeguard their reputation, maintain consumer trust, and prevent lost sales and revenue.

Brand impersonation damage

A popular global sports equipment brand found its customer call center overwhelmed with customer complaints about orders that hadn’t arrived. Support staff eventually discovered that the complainants had seen large discounts advertised on search engines and social media, which directed them to scam websites. These scams not only stole the brand’s sales, they also sabotaged customer satisfaction – 63 percent of consumers blame the brands themselves for spoof websites.

With the brand’s existing approach to online brand protection, the company only identified scams after the fraud had occurred and customers were harmed. Once customers brought the scams to the company’s attention, the company had to expend the time and financial resources necessary for lawyers to send cease-and-desist letters and file complaints to the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP).

Each hour that a deceitful post or site remains accessible, more customers fall victim, piling on the negative impacts on customer loyalty and brand reputation, as well as increased call volume from the complaints.

Each quarter seems to set a new record for the number of fake websites impersonating brands. The Anti-Phishing Working Group reported a record 1.2 million such threats in the third quarter of 2022, which works out to 13,644 online brand impersonations reported each day. While the volume may startle you, adjustments to legacy approaches to these threats can make your online brand protection efforts more effective, less expensive, and less time-consuming.

What consumer brands can do

1. Register and maintain trademarks

Trademarking your brand name and logo protects you against others using them. To maintain your registration, you need to continue using the trademark symbol in all or your communications, and periodically file maintenance documents with the U.S. Patent Office – and pay associated fees – to keep your registration alive.

A trademark is crucial should you want to enforce your rights and prevent other parties from using your brand. When requesting that a registrar, host, or other service provider remove content that abuses your brand, an up-to-date trademark will be crucial supporting evidence. And, if you’re forced to file a UDRP complaint in an effort to take down a domain using your trademark, you are required to clearly demonstrate that you own the trademark in question.

2. Claim your brand on all social media

Your brand needs to establish itself in the online channels that customers, partners, and employees frequent. As obvious as this may sound, ensure you own any internet domain you plan to use for commerce. Consider registering multiple top-level domains (TLDs) as well. You don’t need to register every possible variant of your domain name – you’ll spend far too much money and time trying to buy and manage them.

Then, take the same approach with social media. Make sure you’re claiming your brand’s accounts on popular social media platforms. You don’t want someone else creating those accounts in an attempt to impersonate your brand. As new platforms enter the market, take the time to claim your brand accounts there as well, whether you plan to make use of them or not. Also, over-communicate to customers about where they should and should not engage with your brand on social media, and make that information readily accessible on your website.

3. Automate continuous monitoring

Ongoing monitoring for impersonations is crucial. Here’s why – each day people publish billions of Facebook posts, hundreds of millions of tweets, and millions of LinkedIn updates. Also, each day there are hundreds of thousands of new websites, thousands of new mobile apps on Google Play and Apple’s app store, not to mention thousands more on third-party marketplaces.

Even if you’re checking, looking at a site, profile, or app listing just once can only provide a false sense of security. Content can “go bad” at any time. Attempting to manually search the flood of new online content is a fool’s errand. Fortunately brand protection systems can automate the process of monitoring for misuse of your brand.

Revisiting our example of the global sports brand, by applying AI to the company’s brand protection detection, they began spotting and eradicating spoofs before a single person fell victim. This also led to the reduction of scam-related call volume by 93 percent.

4. Rally the troops

Every employee can potentially contribute to a brand’s reputation. Front-line support, marketing, cyber security, and legal teams all have a role to play. Make employees aware of the risks of online brand impersonation and make sure they know how to identify it and avoid it.

Most importantly, ensure that all employees – and customers, for that matter – know where to report a potential online brand impersonation that’s targeting your organization. A clear reporting process accelerates your response, so you’re mitigating scams and the associated damage as quickly as possible.

5. Create – or update – your response plan

Have you documented how your organization will respond to a fake website, deceptive social media profile, or counterfeit mobile app that impersonates your brand? If not, be sure to clarify where and how incidents of brand impersonation should be reported.

Ensure your teams familiarize themselves with the process of reporting abuse to registrars, hosts, social media platforms, and mobile app marketplaces. Spell out the specific roles and responsibilities for response. And run a simulated exercise so that, during an actual brand impersonation incident, the team isn’t executing the plan for the first time.

The bottom line

Brand impersonation is one of the most serious threats that companies face today. No company can afford to have its identity hijacked, especially considering that consumers will probably hold them responsible for nefarious activities that the brands themselves had nothing to do with. But with the right preparation, any brand can create a system that protects both the company’s reputation and the pocketbooks of its consumers.

Josh Shaul is the CEO of Allure Security. He is known as a visionary security leader with expertise in building teams, creating strategy, and driving growth for security companies of varying sizes. He is passionate about providing comprehensive digital protection to businesses while inspiring trust and confidence in their customers and clients. He is recognized as a leader with strong diplomatic skills, a natural affinity for cultivating and nurturing global relationships and for possessing unwavering personal ethics and integrity.