Protect your company and executives from impersonation

Brand impersonation is an act of pretending to be another person/ brand for the purpose of fraud and taking advantage of a position in the market.

Brand impersonation can be especially dangerous when customers are misled into sharing their personal information via social media messaging, email or web forms. Counterfeit goods are also sold very often from impersonated accounts and cloned websites, and consumers can be exposed to many other cybercrimes, so it is essential to implement impersonation protection techniques and tools.

Brand impersonation comes in many forms, from phishing scams asking you to provide personal information to an outside account to full-blown online fraud where you buy products from shady sellers. All types of impersonation should be detected immediately to protect the reputation of your brand. Your business should use the best software to avoid impersonation for this purpose.

Here are some examples of common impersonation attacks:

Phishing: The act of phishing entails impersonating a brand (or its employees) in order to obtain sensitive customer information, such as social security numbers, passwords, or bank account numbers.
Counterfeiting: The act of selling and creating fake pages of a brand in order to deceive consumers.
Scams: Despite not always impersonating a third party, many of the main scams on the Internet (coupons, romance fraud, 491 scams, account takeover, etc.) are linked to identity theft through social networks.

The easiest way to know if someone is impersonating your brand online is to search for your brand’s name online. The website, social media platform, or app will show you all the accounts using your name.

The first thing you can do to know if someone is impersonating your brand online is to search for your brand’s name on social media account lists, app stores, and search engines. However, very often impersonation is perpetrated in stand-alone rogue websites that are not indexed by search engines (i.e. the deep web) and that attract consumers via ads, banners, and social media posts. For those cases, impersonation protection software detection technology is required in order to effectively find out who is impersonating your brand.

When it comes to impersonation protection, early detection and removal are the most important steps.

Red Points’ impersonation protection software offers the possibility of detecting, monitoring, and enforcing unauthorized profiles on social media, apps, websites, and domains that impersonate your brand’s official accounts.

All the potential infringements can be registered on Red Points’ impersonation protection platform so that brands can access it to check and analyze results, confirm the infringements and protect from brand impersonation in the future.

Impersonators can steal your content and upload it under a fake domain in a matter of minutes for several purposes:

Divert Traffic: Creating ads under the genuine brand name and stealing traffic

Sell Counterfeits: Using look-alike sites that mimic your official website

Commit Fraud: Creating phishing sites to steal users’ personal and financial information