Businesses spend an incredible amount of time and money developing their brand. Enterprises understand that brand recognition and trust play a huge role in connecting with customers and building lasting relationships. However, not all companies are aware of how important brand protection is. Instances of fraudulent brand impersonation are on the rise, especially using voice lines.

In this article, we cover:

• Why fraudsters use brands to execute scams.
• The consequences of fraudulent brand impersonation.
• How you can use brand protection services to maintain your brand reputation.

Why Do Fraudsters Use Trusted Brands? 

Scam artists who use voice lines to execute fraud want to gain trust as quickly as possible. When bad actors are making calls to potential victims, the goal is typically to take financial advantage of the victim. However, victims are much less likely to fall for a scam if they are distrusting of the voice on the other end.

Impersonation is one of the best ways to gain trust. Scam artists know that they generally won’t be able to impersonate someone the victim knows personally. After all, if a stranger called claiming to be your father or daughter, you would immediately recognize that the voice on the other end of the phone was that of a stranger.

Using a brand is one of the easiest shortcuts for a fraudster to take when they are seeking to gain the trust of someone they are calling. Think about it: you wouldn’t give out your credit card information to a stranger on the street if they came up and asked you for it. However, you regularly hand over your credit card information to strangers every day when making purchases at the store or online.

This is why fraudulent brand impersonation plays such a big role in vishing (voice+phishing) scams. When scamming over voice channels, it is essential to trick the person on the other end into thinking they are talking with a professional. Oftentimes, scammers pretend to be sales representatives or customer service representatives in order to get sensitive information out of the person on the other end of the line.

Consequences Of Fraudulent Brand Impersonation 

Brand protection might be just as important as brand building. An increasing amount of companies have found themselves dealing with the negative effects of brand impersonation, and once fraud is committed in the brand’s name, it is hard to undo the damage completely.

Customers who have been scammed by bad actors using your brand’s name often blame the brand for the bad outcomes. After all, the only reason they handed over sensitive information to the fraudster is that they genuinely believed them to be a company representative. Therefore, when they don’t receive the goods or services that they think they have purchased, the blame will fall on the company that has been impersonated. This is one of the reasons why proactively investing in brand protection is so important.

How Brand Protection Works

At YouMailPS, we know that it can be exhausting to deal with fraudulent brand impersonation. You probably have many more things to worry about than brand impersonation and brand probation. (Who ever really thought that their brand reputation would be threatened by scam artists who impersonate your staff?) That is why YouMailPS set out to create a service to help companies deal with fraudulent brand impersonation. When starting your brand protection journey, there are two main services you can look into: brand defense and brand monitoring.

Brand Monitoring

It is impossible to stop brand impersonation if you don’t know it is happening. Our brand monitoring service monitors mentions of your brand over the voice channel. Our monitoring services look out for impersonation attempts and notifies you immediately if we detect suspicious activity. By being made aware of cases of trademark infringement, you can stop the damage from spreading.

Brand Defense

Brand defense is our full-spectrum service that not only helps to identify attacks, but to stop them in their tracks. We will not only alert you to instances of brand impersonation but also help you collect evidence of these infractions and execute enforcement to stop bad actors from using your brand name fraudulently.

Preventing damage from being done is much more effective than waiting for a situation to escalate to serious levels. Taking action against brand impersonation could be instrumental in maintaining your brand's reputation. If you want to prevent your brand from being compromised, you can read more about the services offered by YouMailPS here >

Is Your Brands Reputation at Risk?

Listen to actual robocall scams impersonating companies in our

Brand Impersonation Scam Call Index