Fake websites. Fraudulent accounts. Phishing and smishing attempts. Every impersonation of your brand erodes your reputation and consumer trust, costing you and your customers money. In 2024 alone, scams impersonating businesses and governments resulted in $2.95 billion in U.S. consumer losses according to the Federal Trade Commission. 

Having an effective brand protection strategy is a crucial component of digital risk protection — one aimed at safeguarding your brand reputation and consumer trust. Without a plan to protect your brand, reputational damage could cause untold losses for your business. 

In this post, we’ll outline: 

• What is Brand Protection? 

• What is Online Impersonation and Why Is It a Growing Threat?

• How Brand Protection Solutions Help Stop Online Impersonation

• Real-World Impacts of Brand Impersonation

• How to Get Started with Brand Protection

What is Brand Protection?

In a nutshell, brand protection is the proactive defense of a company’s reputation, intellectual property, and identity — logos, trademarks, messaging — from misuse across digital platforms. This is much broader than copyright and trademark enforcement, which is often a legal enforcement action that brands can take when someone is using a mark that is identical or significantly similar to the registered trademark without authorization. 

Brand protection involves strategies and tools to safeguard a brand from misuse, infringement, and fraud. It addresses a variety of threats, including:

• Trademark and copyright infringement

• Domain name squatting and fake websites

• Online brand abuse, such as phishing or impersonation

• Social media fraud and fake accounts

• Negative reviews, defamation, and online reputation attacks

Leveraging effective brand protection solutions is critical to maintaining customer trust, defending your market position, and protecting your brand’s integrity both online and offline. 

What is Online Impersonation and Why Is It a Growing Threat?

Thousands of fraudulent websites, emails, and even text messages are created each day in an attempt to trick visitors into sharing personal and financial information. Fake websites can spoof domains to mimic legitimate sites, often for tolls, invoices, or login pages. And, as artificial intelligence (AI) makes it even easier and faster for bad actors to impersonate a brand, online impersonation is a threat that keeps growing. 

Case in point: Netcraft recently shared how yet another AI tool — Same — has been used to clone and deploy a copy of a website, including some backend behavior. It can also change where the credentials of the login page are sent without the user ever touching a single line of code. 

But, it’s not just fake websites that brands and consumers need to worry about. Top online impersonation threats cover everything from fake websites to social media copycats to emails and text messages. 

Phishing and smishing involves fraudsters impersonating a brand via emails and SMS to steal credentials or payments. Similarly, social media copycats will clone profiles and pages on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), and more to exploit followers. According to the Federal Trade Commission, consumers have reported losing $2.7 billion to scams originating on social media platforms since 2021, surpassing losses from any other contact method. AI has also enabled more and more bad actors to leverage deep fakes on TikTok and Instagram to fully impersonate a profile with convincing deepfake videos. 

How Brand Protection Helps Stop Online Impersonation

Brand protection solutions can stop online impersonation in its tracks by providing continuous brand monitoring across web activity and enabling brands to quickly detect and take down threats.  

Detection

Manually tracking down malicious websites and social media pages is slow and ineffective. The best brand protection solutions operate 24/7 — searching the internet for misuse of your brand’s name and likeness across a multitude of data sources.

Brand protection platforms need to be able to identify cyber attacks across a threat landscape that is constantly evolving. This requires a combination of extensive domain knowledge and sophisticated automation to detect attacks with speed and accuracy using AI and pattern recognition to detect brand abuse. 

Takedown Mechanisms

When it comes to protecting your consumers and online reputation, speed matters. Before you even know there’s an issue, a single fraudster could create hundreds of fraudulent sites impersonating your brand. Traditional methods of taking down websites can be slow and ineffective, allowing criminals to keep operating and doing untold harm to your brand and consumers.

The best online brand protection platforms leverage automated takedown capabilities to disrupt cyber attacks and block victims from accessing phishing sites within minutes, and remove malicious content within hours. 

That’s exactly what Netcraft did for YoungLA, significantly reducing the time to take down fake sites. During its proof of concept, Netcraft achieved a record 31-minute takedown — far outperforming YoungLA’s prior solution.

Continuous Threat Intelligence and Monitoring Dashboards

With hundreds of attack types and millions of data points from online activity and an ever-growing list of digital channels, gaining continuous visibility across global web activity can be a tall order.

Threat intelligence filters this massive amount of data down into operational insight that allows malicious content to be identified, disrupted, and ultimately taken down. For instance, Netcraft’s global threat feeds cover more than 100 threat types, including phishing, malware, and scams targeting any brand or institution, for clients and non-clients alike. These feeds are licensed broadly by the most popular web browsers and antivirus companies. Each day Netcraft protects billions of people against cyber attacks, often within minutes of detection.

In addition, Netcraft’s reporting and dashboards are customizable to highlight the threats, trends, and attack types that matter for your brand and leadership teams.

Real-World Impacts of Brand Impersonation

Organizations are impacted by brand impersonation threats in a number of ways.

Lost Revenue

Brand impersonation can lead to significant revenue losses as phishing and scam sites intercept sales or lead traffic. These direct financial losses can mean millions or billions in lost revenue for some of the world’s largest brands. For example, consumers reported losing a total of $60 million to Microsoft impersonation scams and $49 million to Publishers Clearing House impersonation scams in 2023, according to the Federal Trade Commission. 

Support Volume Spike

When fraudsters impersonate a brand, customers who interact with these fake websites or scams often contact the legitimate brand's customer service to seek clarification or help. This can lead to a significant spike in calls and emails to the call center. And, because a customer was interacting with a fraudulent site, the call centers are often unable to resolve the issue, adding to the frustration and eroding trust for consumers.

Reputation Damage

Finally, misinformation, scams, and fraud dilute brand trust — and may lead to customers looking elsewhere for products and services in the future. Here’s a few stats on what this impact could be: 

• According to Fintech Finance News, more than 30% of victims choose to not continue with their financial institution following a successful fraud attempt. 

• Risk Management Magazine reports that 79% of consumers said they would stop purchasing from a site after experiencing fraud. 

• According to data from PwC, 87% of customers will take their business to a competitor if they do not trust a company to handle their data responsibly.

How to Build an Effective Brand Protection Strategy

Creating a comprehensive brand protection strategy is an important piece of protecting your brand identity. While not complete, here are a few simple brand protection efforts organizations can take today to protect their brand identity from impersonation:

1. Secure Your Digital Footprint

Register key domain variants like common misspellings or variations with different top-level domains to prevent bad actors from misusing your brand or cybersquatting. You should also set up Google Alerts for mentions of your brand and invest in brand monitoring tools that can look across all types of websites, apps, and profiles to track your brand’s digital footprint. 

2. Use Takedown Services

Partner with a brand protection platform like Netcraft to automate responses. Netcraft’s brand protection solutions are designed to offer quick response and resolution to cyber threats targeting your organization before they can cause extensive damage to brand value and customer trust. Netcraft protects brands in 100+ countries and performs takedowns for four of the ten most phished companies on the internet.

3. Educate Your Teams — and Customers

An informed customer base is often the first line of defense. By educating your customers on how to recognize malicious content, you can lower the risk of threat actors achieving their objectives. Customer awareness activities include:

• Direct communications, including emails, newsletters, and in-app notifications showing examples of real phishing attempts and providing step-by-step tips to differentiate between legitimate and fraudulent content.

• A dedicated page on your website containing information like the above, as well as how customers can report phishing attempts.

• Automated support that requires limited resources, such as website chatbots, can be used to provide real-time advice if they suspect they are being targeted.

In addition, you should educate and align your employees, particularly your legal, communications, customer service, and IT teams, on impersonation response protocols so that they know what to do when a threat is detected.

Take Your Brand Integrity Seriously

Brand reputation and customer loyalty are irreplaceable assets for any thriving business. Leaving your brand identity open for exploitation by counterfeiters and other brand infringement opportunities is a risk you can't afford. 

Putting your brand protection efforts in the hands of expert solutions like Netcraft allows you to focus on building brand awareness, not protecting the foothold you've already carved out. 

Brand Protection FAQ 

What’s the difference between trademark enforcement and brand protection?

Trademark enforcement is legal and reactive, while brand protection is continuous and proactive through digital monitoring.

Can small businesses benefit from brand protection?

Absolutely. Smaller brands are often easier targets due to lower public visibility and fewer resources.

Can brand protection software stop phishing?

It doesn’t stop phishing emails directly, but it can remove the spoofed websites and alert you to impersonation before phishing reaches customers.

What’s the difference between brand protection and digital risk protection?

Brand protection zeroes in on threats that exploit a company’s identity; think phishing sites, fake domains, and impersonated social media accounts, and these threats are designed to trick customers and erode trust. The goal isn’t to breach your network; it’s to exploit your brand from the outside in. Digital risk protection (DRP) casts a wider net, covering everything from data leaks and credential exposure to dark web chatter and emerging threats across the digital landscape. TL;DR: brand protection is a vital part of DRP but not the whole story. Both are essential, especially as today’s attackers often cause serious damage without ever touching the corporate perimeter.