The role of payment providers in online brand protection

 

Online brand protection encompasses versatile and comprehensive actions, a significant part of which takes place, as the name suggests, online. No wonder; the internet provides fraudsters with vast opportunities to infringe on your IP rights and steal your revenue. And thanks to providers like Shopify, setting up compelling and convincing fakeshops is just a matter of time.

 

Which is why we developed our effective and successful domain monitoring service.

 

 

What is domain monitoring

Simply put, we check the internet to see if anybody has set up a website featuring your brand and/or product name without your authorisation. We run keyword-based searches and check all levels of TLDs, meta descriptions, keywords and html text for any unauthorised use of your keywords.

 

Check out our domain monitoring service here!

 

With versatile filter options, we quickly discard any authorised shops and fan sites to focus on fraudulent domains that really infringe on your IP rights. Thanks to our extensive network of industry professionals which include search engines, payment providers, domain registries, registrars and hosters, we then enforce your rights and demand the takedown of the domain.

 

This is the most effective way to remove infringing domains with a success rate of over 92%. But what happens when the hoster, registry, registrar etc. is unavailable or too slow to take action?

 

That’s where payment providers come in.

 

 

Payment blocking in online brand protection

As opposed to fake marketplace listings, fraudulent domains often have a wider context and hidden interrelationships with each other. Several fake domains redirect to others, while in some cases, the host country has different laws or the individual domain registrars could simply prove to be uncooperative.

 

As you can see, domain takedowns are often complex and may take some time due to external circumstances. Unfortunately, IP infringing domains can cause significant damage for your brand as they can generate quite a large volume of sales in your name.

 

To minimise these damages, we have developed effective workarounds to stop the infringement as soon as possible. One of these workarounds is payment blocking.

 

The idea behind this method is really simple. Why are fraudsters in the business of infringing on your IP rights? To make money by stealing your revenue, of course. And where does the money come from? Via payments made through their fakeshop.

 

 

Illustration of a person paying online with their credit card

 

 

In case we can’t shut down a fakeshop immediately, we go for the next best thing: stopping their influx of money. It works on the same basis as our “classic” domain takedowns.

 

We report the fakeshop’s domain to its payment providers, flagging it as a fraudulent site and asking them to stop processing payments coming in via that domain. This is in the interest of the payment providers as well, as they don’t want to become involved in fraud and any subsequent legal action.

 

We have developed excellent cooperation with the best-known and most widely used credit card providers and online payment systems, which allows us to act quickly and efficiently.

 

Once the money stops coming in, the fraudsters have no choice but to abandon the domain as it doesn’t generate any more revenue for them.

 

 

Related topics

Klarna wants a bigger role in e-Commerce

 

PayPal payments possible on Amazon

 

Online bank issued 1600 fake bank accounts

 

 

Take a look at an interesting case that we solved thanks to payment blocking!

 

 

Case study of payment blocking by globaleyez

During a regular domain monitoring session for a client, we came across a fakeshop that didn’t yield to any of our classic enforcement methods.

 

Learn all about enforcement!

 

After a quick consultation among the team, we decided to approach the fakeshop’s payment provider. They responded quickly and blocked all payments initiated via the fakeshop’s domain.

 

However, in the course of our sustainable enforcement service where we check back a few days later to ensure that the fraudulent content hasn’t popped back up again, we discovered that the fakeshop was still running. How was that possible?

 

We approached the payment provider again and it turned out that the fraudsters had found a workaround for our payment block. They redirected the payments via a different domain, thus fooling the payment provider’s system into thinking it was dealing with another webshop. We informed the provider and blocked this domain as well.

 

Now sure that these fraudsters won’t give up so easily, we checked back and found that they did the same trick again. We blocked that too and repeated this a few times until the domain registrar finally responded to our enforcement request and removed the actual fakeshop from the internet.

 

Thanks to payment blocking, our client’s rights were protected even in those frustrating days where we waited for the domain registrar to take action.  

 

This case demonstrates the innovative, out-of-the-box thinking online brand protection experts have to regularly employ to catch evasive fraudsters. Moreover, it also highlights the inherent connection between IP infringements and revenue losses. The payments fakeshops receive are actually your revenue, stolen from both your brand and your would-be customers.

 

Don’t let that happen to you. Contact us and let us protect your IP rights, your revenue and your customers from fraudsters!