Protect your ideas AND your customers on the internet

The price of success – As avoiding damage upstream is better for your image, your sales and your litigation budget, and for the good of your customers and partners, monitor the possible counterfeiting on the Internet for everything that makes you successful with your customers, prospects and Internet users in general.

Track down the fraudulent use of your company’s name, of your products that sell well, of the services that make up your reputation, of your notoriety… on internet sites/domain names, social networks, hashtags… and you will discover some of the current tricks of counterfeiters:

• The classic sale under the imitation of your name of fake products, sadly a common fact in fashion, but dangerous for your customers (and your image) when it comes to counterfeit toys, car spare parts, sports equipment…, lacking in terms of security.

• Phishing aimed at recovering the data of your credulous customers via sites reproducing your name and offering unstoppable promotions, lotteries… e.g.: free Air France tickets… via the airfrance-tickets.club site.

• The sale under your name of products that were never delivered, e.g. car spare parts paid for by Internet users, never received, because they were ordered from an Italian site that siphoned off the brand name and content of a legitimate, reputable French site that actually sells the said spare parts – and against which some of the stolen Internet users turned away.

• Theft by identity theft via an email address imitating the name of a company, e.g. the address @icadepromotion.eu for the French real estate group ICADE (icade.fr): the fraudster ordered building materials from the group’s suppliers, had them delivered abroad and asked the suppliers to send their invoices to the French company ICADE…

• The copy of the address of the AXA customer extranet – savings products https://connect.axa.fr, via the registration of the domain name connect-axa.com – the swindler was thus able to quietly transfer the funds paid by the inattentive AXA customers when they connected to this counterfeit extranet.

To protect yourself, there are several options: Rely on a member of your team who is a fan of the Internet, social networks, etc. and who is comfortable tracking down the reproduction of your brand on these media, or on your sales and operational staff in the field – or professionalise this monitoring via automated monitoring tools, personalised according to the criteria specific to your activity, which are available from service providers specialising in the monitoring of brands such as Solidnames (with whom we work, to be transparent), which publishes a site Faux.fr, which is relevant to increasing your knowledge of Internet counterfeiting…

– Sylvie BOYER, Paralegal at Mark & Law