Piracy on social media

In addition to social media piracy, i.e. advertising or offering counterfeit goods via for example Facebook, social networks present even more problems for international brand manufacturers. Cybersquatting is also popular with scammers. This involves registering names as Internet domain names or social media account names which the registrant isn’t actually entitled to. They misuse these names to capture the brand manufacturer’s traffic and use them for fraudulent purposes.

When developing an international brand, it makes sense to use the right profile and user names on social media and consequently benefit from enormous branding impact. Even if these profiles aren’t yet supposed to be actively used, it makes sense to register them straight away. This thwarts cybersquatters on social media from the outset. It’s usually very difficult to recover misused account names and it requires a lot of effort.

The Hilton hotel chain has for instance fallen prey to cybersquatting. When it wanted to open a Twitter account for its hotel in San Diego, the names @HiltonSanDiego and @SanDiegoHilton were already in use. If Hilton had consequently opted for @HiltonSanDiegoCA, users would quickly suspect this was a fake account despite being held by the actual brand – and the actual fake account with the “right” name would succeed and could tap sensitive data.

More information about typosquatting and cybersquatting can be found in our blog article.

EBRAND works with brand manufacturers to combat the fraudulent social media activities described above. Using highly effective software, we monitor user profiles, posts, content and images on a variety of channels – worldwide and around the clock. In this way, abusive content, ads or profiles can be detected and dealt with before they become critical and create uncontrollable risks for brand manufacturers.

If sellers are active on different platforms, our technology joins up the “dots” such as contact data, seller and profile names or web pages. The aim is not only to delete individual listings, but to stop all online sales activities of fraudulent sellers.

On the EBRAND’s piracy platform, brand owners can view all social media posts, tweets and profiles about their brand and sort them according to a number of factors, e.g. according to the sellers with the most offers or the largest volume. You can arrange for an abusive listing to be deleted by the experts at EBRAND in just one click.