Fraudulent Online Shops
A 100-year-old running apparel company popular among U.S. runners faced a surge in customer fraud complaints due to fake online shops exploiting their brand. The fraudsters behind those shops lured consumers with too-good-go-be-true discounts on shoes and apparel to steal payment information or conduce non-delivery fraud. The threat–growing from one impersonation attack per week to nearly 20–resulted in lost sales, brand damage, and fraud complaints inundating their call center.
The company’s initial approach to fake online shops, filing Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) complaints, was too expensive, too slow, and ineffectual. The UDRP process was not only costly at $1,000 per filing (and $10,000 in some cases with overseas registrars) but also slow and failed to halt scams before customers fell victim, leading to a negative perception of the brand and decreased customer satisfaction.
Proactively Addressing the Issue
Researching a record-breaking week of nearly 100 customer complaints about fake online shops, the brand recognized they could no longer suffer the continued degradation of their online reputation, and their existing process was unsustainable. With this urgency in mind, they decided they needed to proactively address the issue head-on.
Wanting to refocus internal staff on core competencies, they sought out external online brand protection expertise. After evaluating four vendors they chose Allure Security for its AI-powered online brand-protection-as-a-service. This included protecting their brand on social media to counter deceptive ads and posts that direct consumers to counterfeit e-commerce sites.
Allure Security’s AI engine excels in detecting impersonations that evade others by automating the examination of virtually every new domain published online for potential brand impersonations.
Deployment is also near instantaneous thanks to the fact that there are no complex integration or code changes necessary.
In addition, unlike other solutions the team evaluated that flagged thousands of pages for manual review, Allure Security’s AI engine employs computer vision and natural language processing to automate the task, significantly reducing false positives.
The Results
Once the team implemented Allure Security, customer complaints about counterfeit e-commerce shops plummeted 93 percent. The fraud analyst and his team presented this substantial decrease in call volume to management–a clear indication that fewer customers were falling victim. Management also appreciated the quantification of more fake online shops identified, blocklisted, and taken down faster than ever before.