By Steve Levy
You know that an issue has grown to a substantial size when it makes it into The Wall Street Journal. For many years now, FairWinds has been helping clients navigate the dangers of online counterfeits and fraud and it seems we were well ahead of the curve. A June 10th WSJ article, quoting Alastair Gray, Director Of Anticounterfeiting for the International Trademark Association (INTA) is titled “Scammers’ New Way of Targeting Small Businesses: Impersonating Them – Copycats are using videos and photos to pose as real small-business owners and dupe their customers”. In these evolving schemes, scammers use the legitimate business owners’ videos, logos and social-media posts to assume their identities and steer customers to cheap knockoffs or simply take their money. In many cases, the legitimate business owner is the target of misplaced customer complaints and even receives returns of sub-standard merchandise that they did not sell. Some businesses have taken to social media to warn would-be buyers about the fake listings, but this carries its own risk to the brand’s reputation as customers may shy away altogether fearing that they can’t differentiate between the fake and legitimate sellers.
Many targeted businesses have sought to have these scam ads, accounts, and websites taken down on their own but have met with mixed success. The WSJ article mentions the case of an elaborate hummingbird feeder whose Amazon page received so many negative reviews that the seller had to shut down the account and start from scratch. It had tried to handle the situation itself but couldn’t get Amazon to remove the fake listings and reviews. It was only after being contacted by the seller’s attorney that the platform removed the negative reviews.
For many years, FairWinds has developed an effective tool kit to handle these situations including takedown demands under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), reporting trademark abuse to the relevant platforms or hosting providers, sending demand letters to scammers and, where infringing domain names are involved, filing complaints under the UDRP. Sometimes follow-ups are required, as well as the occasional cat-and-mouse pursuit, but this is all quite routine for us. Some scammers are tough nuts to crack but, in our experience, focus and persistence most often pay off. The bad actors typically decide that it’s not worth the trouble to keep going after our clients’ brands and they move on to softer targets.
Like any anti-counterfeiting or anti-fraud program, there are costs involved but the investment pays off since the alternative is to let a valuable brand reputation sink into the swamp of forgeries, fraud, and fleeing customers who no longer know which way to turn for a safe haven of genuine, quality products.