Your brand’s digital presence is essential to reaching your target audience and strengthening customer trust. However, this same visibility attracts fraudsters who impersonate your company to carry out scams, exploit your reputation, and deceive consumers across different online channels.
Fraudsters use elements of your brand—such as name, logo, tax ID (CNPJ), visual identity, and tone of voice—to create convincing pages that appear legitimate and mislead users. These scams harm both consumers and the brand, putting your credibility at risk.
How does fraudulent brand use affect your company?
Fraudulent brand use may result in:
Financial scams, such as fraud, fake charges, nonexistent partnership offers, and payment requests for fake products or services.
Illegal collection of personal and financial data, which is then used for fraud, social engineering, or sold within criminal communities.
Improper association with fake partners, damaging your reputation and creating customer confusion.
Loss of consumer trust, directly affecting your brand’s credibility and public perception.
We monitor various types of violations through textual mentions on the page or in the HTML code, detected by our bots. Common cases include:
Fake bills (boletos) — pages offering duplicate bills or invoices.
Credit card scams — improper requests for card data, especially in financial institutions.
Loan scams — misuse of name, logo, tax ID, and visual layout to simulate credit offers.
Improper association — sites claiming the brand as a client, supplier, or partner without authorization.
Fake discount coupons — used to capture data or redirect to malicious sites.
Fake job or internship listings — created to collect personal information under false pretenses.
Compliance violations — legitimate partners using the brand without following official guidelines.
Telelistings — pages with fake customer support numbers, outdated addresses, or contacts belonging to malicious third parties.
How do fraudsters spread brand misuse today?
Scams are increasingly sophisticated and spread across multiple channels. Common strategies include:
1. Highly optimized fake websites
Fraudsters create pages mimicking the official website and use SEO techniques to rank high on Google, increasing the chances of capturing victims.
2. Paid ads on social media
Criminals purchase ads on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X using:
your brand logo,
persuasive text,
links leading to fake bills, credit scams, or false promotions.
These ads are highly targeted, increasing scam conversion rates.
3. Google Ads and sponsored links
Scammers pay for ads that redirect users to fake pages, especially during searches like “duplicate bill,” “customer service phone number,” “credit card,” or “urgent loan.”
4. Fraud marketplaces
There are private forums where fraudsters share ready-made templates of fake pages, with placeholders to insert real brand identities.
5. WhatsApp, Telegram, and SMS
Malicious links are sent in bulk with fake offers, coupons, job opportunities, partnerships, or supposed brand announcements.
6. Fake influencers and manipulated reviews
Unofficial profiles post videos, testimonials, or reviews to simulate legitimacy and attract victims.
7. Fraudulent telelistings
Pages publish fake customer service phone numbers where fraudsters convince consumers to pay bills, share data, or approve transactions.
8. Fake commercial representatives
Sites or pages falsely claim to be official representatives, distributors, or franchisees, offering nonexistent services or products.
How does Fraudulent Brand Use Monitoring work?
Our monitoring uses specialized bots that scan websites indexed by major search engines (e.g., Google and Bing). They identify pages mentioning your brand alongside terms relevant to your industry, making the process more precise and effective.
To be considered a threat:
The page must be indexed by search engines.
The page must be relevant, appearing among the top search results.
The brand mention must be textual, either on the page content or in the HTML code.
⚠️ Bots do not monitor images in this offering. There must be a textual mention, either visible on the page or in its HTML, for image content to be analyzed.
Content that is not considered a violation:
Pages that only mirror content from YouTube, Pinterest, or Instagram
Pornographic content
News websites
Fake news without a clear fraudulent intent involving the brand
Manual Creation of Fraudulent Brand Use Tickets
If you need to create a ticket manually, the process is simple and similar to other offerings on the platform. For details, refer to the article “Manual Ticket Addition.”
Before creating: Perform a search on the platform to ensure the ticket does not already exist. See the article “Manual Ticket Search.”
Step-by-step:
Access Digital Frauds.
On the right side, click + Add Ticket.
Select the asset related to the fraud.
Choose the ticket type Brand Misuse.
Indicate whether it will be an Incident or moved to Quarantine.
Enter the URL.
If there is more than one, select Create more than one ticket.
Click + Add.
🎉 Done! Your ticket has been successfully created.
If you have any questions, just reach out to us at [email protected]! 😊