How to Protect Your Brand From Identity Theft Online

Most people spend quite a lot of time, effort, and money on creating a brand, only for others to just outright copy some of their ideas and essentially piggyback off their success. This can certainly be a frustrating situation regardless of what part of the process you’re in with regard to building your brand. Are there tangible ways for you to protect your brand from identity theft online? Do these methods potentially limit the amount of exposure that your brand can truly have online? Our team is going to go over all of these concerns here.

Tricks To Keep People From Creating Fakes Sites & Social Media Profiles

One of the ways that people have taken advantage of the success of other brands is by creating fake sites or social media profiles. In the worst-case scenario, they offer your products to the people arriving at those sites. What tends to happen is that they end up scamming all of the people that try and purchase anything through these fake sites and social media handles. The best way to be able to avoid this is to buy out all of the domain names that can be relevant to the name of your brand.

Let’s use an example for a known brand like Pepsi. So Pepsi potentially owns Pepsi.com, PepsiCola.com, Pepsidrinks.com. In reality, the larger brands don’t face this issue as much because they’ve been covered for years. Scammers that steal the identity of a brand that sells millions of dollars though can come up with a massive payday.

The good thing about purchasing domains is that you can actually redirect people who type in what is potentially a fake name to your actual site when you’re the owner of the fake domain as well. It can be hard for a small brand to buy a ton of domains, but it is the best way to protect yourself.

As far as social media pages go, you can for one make sure that your main profile is verified. That’s one of the things that gives you status as a brand. Also, you can create accounts for all of the fake names that you can think of that can resemble your main brand handle. You can also link to the right handle in these “fake accounts”. The good thing about socializing is that doing this is free!

Protecting Your Website

Maybe even worse than being scammed is going through an issue on the actual site of the brand that you’re trying to purchase from. Even if you’re a small brand, if you run an online store you want to make sure that all of the payments are protected with the best technology on the market. This isn’t necessarily protection against identity theft online, but it is a way to keep a good online reputation.

Not only for payments but on your site make sure that you’re paying for the protection that credits you as a safe site. The top bar has to show the little lock that certifies you as a safe site. That’s something that you can buy from your domain provider, there’s really not much of an issue there to speak of. Just make sure that you’re buying the right protection.

Do you want to protect the content on your site? It can take some considerable time and effort to not only craft logos, and images, but also written content to promote your products. There are plugins that you can add to your site that don’t allow people to copy-paste the written content or download images from the site directly. This can be a great way to make it harder for people to literally plagiarize your content. When it comes to logos, and images what you’ll be ensuring is that at the very least you’ll be able to keep the high-quality images that you upload to yourself.

Register Your Brand & Company Name

Going through the necessary legal process to register your brand can be a real pain. This is why a lot of people avoid it, particularly if they are just starting out. Sadly, doing so can literally mean that people will be able to steal your brand on a legal basis, and make you the infractor in a worst-case scenario.

Even if you can prove that you were the true mastermind behind the brand, the legal process of having to get your brand back can be much more expensive, and exhausting than just doing things by the book in the first place. At the very least you want to make sure that your brand is a properly registered trademark in your home country.

It’s not just about the brand name, of course, you also need logos, and other images associated with your brand to be in essence legally yours. Ideally, you’ll be able to include all of these things into one process. That way again, you won’t have to come back and register new images or whatever it may be every 5 minutes. Having the legal rights to the name and logos that your brand uses is going to give you a platform to defend what’s actually yours.

If you don’t have those things it’s going to make things all that much harder. What you can do if you don’t want to go through the trouble of doing all of this on your own is contact us. We can help any brand implement strategies to protect what’s rightfully theirs.