How to Protect Your Ecommerce Brand from Fake Reviews and Counterfeit Goods

Today's digital markets may offer endless opportunities, but they can also be risky places for brands to do business in. For ecommerce companies, two of the biggest threats are posed by fake reviews and counterfeiters. 

Fake reviews cost the global economy an estimated $152 billion and influence $3.8 trillion in spending. By themselves, fake reviews damage trust in online commerce, but they can also be used to pave the way for an even more serious threat to brand integrity—counterfeit goods. Every year, products that are made or sold without the brand owner's permission cost legitimate companies trillions in lost revenue and lead to the injury or even death of consumers around the world.

So, how can you protect your ecommerce brand and your customers from these threats? Read on to explore how a comprehensive strategy that combines AI-powered detection with human expertise can effectively defend your brand's reputation and revenue.

The Demand for Ecommerce Brand Protection

Brand abuse by bad actors comes in many forms, all of which can significantly impact your business operations and undermine customer relationships. In fact, research shows that almost two-thirds of consumers will blame organizations for any bad behavior linked to their brand, including the harm caused by fake reviews and counterfeit goods. Let's take a closer look at these two threats.

The Growing Need for Brand Protection Against Fake Reviews 

Customer trust is central to ecommerce success, and 66% of consumers report they would stop buying from brands if that trust is compromised. You can do your best to live up to that expectation in-house, but it's hard to control what happens in the spaces outside your control. 

While third-party marketplaces and dedicated review sites may seem like the Wild West, the customer feedback they share is vital to your reputation and your sales. Indeed, research shows that 89% of consumers rely on these online reviews to help them make purchasing decisions.  

Yet, the nature of these spaces means competitors or threat actors can easily organize review bombing campaigns, posting massive amounts of fake negative reviews in an act of commercial sabotage or political protest. This type of abuse distorts consumer behavior and reduces confidence in online marketplaces, leading to lost sales or diverting customers to competing or counterfeit products. For businesses, the repercussions of fake reviews can prove devastating:

• 94% of consumers avoid brands with negative reviews
• 28% say reading fake reviews lowers their confidence in other reviews
• 26% report it would damage their perception of associated brands

Despite ongoing efforts to deter them, fake reviews continue to thrive mainly because of how profitable they are for bad actors.

However, their persistence also stems partly from enforcement challenges. Typically, fake reviews remain visible for around 100 days before removal—plenty of time for their creators to profit from their fraudulent claims. 

Even after they're discovered and removed, fake reviews can continue to interfere with your search rankings and visibility, potentially limiting your digital reach and hurting sales until Google refreshes its search index.

At the same time, the infrastructure supporting false reviews is becoming increasingly sophisticated. For example, there are now organized networks and marketplaces where manufactured opinions can be bought. These spaces even boast commission-based payment structures and reward systems, with compensation ranging from roughly 25 cents to $100 per submission. 

Technological advances further complicate the fight against fake reviews and harm brand protection efforts. Automated systems that generate false reviews using the same automated networks long used for advertisement fraud are now readily accessible for anyone willing to pay.

The Damage Done by Counterfeit Goods

The unauthorized reproduction of products, packaging, or branding elements harms small businesses, multinational companies, and entire economies. Counterfeiting is now a $2 trillion global problem that negatively impacts every industry. In addition to hijacking the profits of reputable businesses, this type of fraud also results in over 350,000 serious injuries and 70 deaths annually, and helps finance additional illegal activities such as gang violence and human trafficking. 

Counterfeiting is often accompanied by additional fraudulent activities such as domain impersonation, aka cybersquatting, where threat actors create fake websites that mimic your brand's online presence. In social media impersonation schemes, scammers set up fake accounts that appear to represent your brand or even pose as one of your executives. Once established, these fake profiles are used as a springboard for further scams, particularly social engineering attacks. According to the FBI, social media impersonations alone have cost businesses worldwide over $5.3 billion, and 50% of all cyberattacks today involve brand impersonation.

The Essential Elements of Ecommerce Brand Protection

To avoid the billions of dollars in lost business and reputational damage caused by counterfeiting, fake reviews, and other types of brand abuse, organizations must find effective ways to remove infringing content, identify counterfeits, and stop repeat offenders. The best solutions increasingly depend on AI tools combined with professional expertise. Collaboration with global platforms is also essential, especially with the threats posed by foreign-based operations.

Signs of Fake Reviews

To understand how to effectively protect your brand, it's important to first learn how to recognize potentially fake reviews. Here's a guide to what to look for:

• Watch for generic language that offers vague praise or criticism without specific details.
• Track increases in negative brand mentions for potential targeted campaigns.
• Identify unusual patterns, such as multiple reviews posted in quick succession, these often indicate coordinated fake review campaigns.
• Investigate suspicious profiles with limited activity or reviewers who only post extreme ratings.
• Look out for language inconsistencies, including poor grammar or awkward phrasing that doesn't match typical customer communication. That said, this telltale sign is fast becoming extinct as Generative AI can easily eliminate linguistic errors.

Counterfeit Brand Protection Strategies

The most effective protection doesn't rely on a single magic bullet, but rather integrates multiple defense mechanisms that work in concert to identify, prevent, and remediate counterfeiting activity across digital and physical channels. By implementing the following strategies, ecommerce brands can significantly reduce their vulnerability to counterfeiting while preserving customer trust and protecting revenue streams:

Register and Monitor Your Intellectual Property

Securing trademark registrations for your brand name, logo, and distinctive product features establishes a legal foundation for enforcing your rights whenever necessary. Establishing clear guidelines for authorized use of your brand assets ensures consistency in both your internal and partner communications.

Physical Product Security 

Take steps to ensure both you and your customers can easily identify genuine products with overt and covert physical security measures. Overt security features include visible elements like hologram seals and specialized packaging that customers can verify for themselves. Covert security adds hidden markers detectable only with specialized equipment, which authorized partners and law enforcement can use for authenticity checks.

Supply Chain Verification

Implementing strict partner verification processes ensures that third party vendors in your distribution channel uphold your brand standards. Track-and-trace systems let you monitor your products throughout the supply chain, identifying potential points of vulnerability. For high-value products, consider serialization for individual product authentication, enabling verification at every stage.

Proactive Monitoring and Enforcement

Effective ecommerce brand protection begins with regular monitoring for potential infringements across marketplaces and social platforms. The sooner you can  identify violations, the easier it is to take action and prevent the problem, spiralling out of your control. 

ZeroFox provides global digital marketplace monitoring that tracks listings across major ecommerce platforms such as Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Alibaba, Facebook Marketplace, Lazada, and more. Additionally, ZeroFox uses social media monitoring tools to identify unauthorized brand representations.

Additionally, ZeroFox Domain Protection enables continuous monitoring of domains and URLs to detect and block threats, including typosquatting and domain spoofing attempts and phishing URLs. The platform automates disruption actions and domain takedowns, with the up/down scanner making sure bad actors can't immediately recreate a malicious domain.

ZeroFox Director of Platform Experience Joe Vidmar explains how domain protection software works:

"We're able to do an analysis of certain characteristics, whether it be their logo, a similar login page, or leveraging IP protected assets, we're able to say, hey this is similar to this protected client content," he says.

"That's when we do a deeper dive into some of the more unique characteristics of that site. Where is it being hosted? Are there redirects? Are there unique things that are being done within the page that might indicate that it is malicious?"

Leverage AI-Powered Detection Tools

The most effective ecommerce counterfeit detection tools use cutting-edge AI technology to identify threats. For example: 

• Image recognition automatically identifies unauthorized use of your product images or logos using single-shot learning algorithms that need only a small amount of data to perform accurate image analysis
• Natural language processing and sentiment analysis inspects text for brand mentions and suspicious language
• Machine learning identifies patterns in counterfeiting activities and enables  AI-driven comparison of potentially malicious websites against protected domains for proactive protection

ZeroFox employs all these ecommerce counterfeit detection tools and more to provide comprehensive protection.

Responding to Brand Abuse

Once your organization detects brand abuse, swift and decisive action is essential to stop bad actors from damaging your brand's reputation and potentially harming consumers with substandard products. Beyond the immediate financial benefits, prompt enforcement also demonstrates to customers, partners, and potential infringers that your brand is not an easy mark, but is actively engaged in protecting its intellectual property and guaranteeing customer safety. Developing a systematic response protocol ensures you respond with consistency to different types of brand abuse and creates an efficient framework for escalating serious cases when necessary. Here's a structured approach to addressing brand abuse effectively:

1. Document the Evidence

This is a key step, as certain criteria need to be met for content to qualify for takedown. Evidence will need to be presented to platform providers before they will take actions such as removing a domain or social media post, or account. You should also keep records of all instances of infringement for potential legal action, establishing patterns of abuse when applicable. 

Begin by capturing screenshots and URLs of infringing content to create a record of the violation. Gather details about the perpetrator when available, which may assist in enforcement actions. During the takedown request process, the ZeroFox platform can help identify evidence requirement gaps.

2. Report and Remove Violations

You can submit takedown requests to each platform hosting infringing content using their established procedures. Most major services have specific tools and processes for reporting counterfeit goods and trademark violations. When appropriate, leverage Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices to enforce copyright claims.

Unlike competing solutions, ZeroFox handles takedowns completely in house thanks to the broad capabilities of our Global Disruption Network. This service, which includes over 700 hosts, registrars, and social media platforms, enables rapid removal of infringing content, often within minutes.

One particularly powerful partnership gives prioritized access to Google's web risk API to request content blocks directly in the browsers of over 5 billion devices. 

Joe Vidmar drives home the benefits: "We'll see that content that Zerofox submits to web risk will get blocked in as little as 15 minutes."

"You'll get the big red screen that says something like, 'Dangerous Site!' or 'Deceptive site ahead!"

"That's one of our really strong capabilities from a disruption standpoint."When standard takedown measures fail, ZeroFox also offers UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) capabilities. This lets you challenge domain names that are identical or confusingly similar to your trademarks if the registered owners lack legitimate rights. Successful complaints can result in the domain being transferred or removed.

3. Provide Education for Your Customers and Yourself

Offer resources to help customers identify authentic products and create an additional layer of protection. Highlight security features that distinguish your genuine merchandise from counterfeits, and create dedicated pages explaining how to spot fakes. These simple steps not only safeguard your buyers but also engage them as partners in brand protection.

At the other end of the value chain, ZeroFox customers get access to a wide array of educational and intelligence sources, including Daily Intelligence Briefs and Global Finished Intelligence.

Our daily intelligence briefs cover emerging cyber threats across various web layers with updates on critical vulnerabilities, active exploits, and ongoing breaches, along with expert recommendations. These reports help organizations stay informed about risks and enable swift mitigation.

ZeroFox Global Finished Intelligence provides enriched and curated intelligence with actionable solutions that empower security teams to protect operations and assets from potential damage.

How ZeroFox Protects Your Brand: The Human Factor

In the digital marketplace, your brand is your most valuable asset. Protecting it requires a trident of vigilance, technology, and expertise. With ZeroFox, you get the comprehensive ecommerce brand protection you need to safeguard your reputation and revenue from threats across social media, domains, and marketplaces.

ZeroFox combines AI-driven ecommerce counterfeit detection with a global disruption infrastructure to identify threats at scale across digital channels. Leveraging the ZeroFox Global Disruption Network, infringing content is often removed within minutes of detection. The platform enables rapid threat remediation and disrupts malicious campaigns through automated takedowns and enforcement, stopping attacks before they escalate.

However, unlike competitors who try to use AI end-to-end, reducing operational scope to increase apparent efficiency, the ZeroFox platform always fuses technology with the expertise of human intelligence analysts to validate threats and provide crucial context for decision-making.

Senior Product Marketing Manager Matthew Levine explains why ZeroFox prefers to take this hybrid approach: 

"There are plenty of things that AI-first companies, like Bolster, miss, because it doesn't fit into their algorithm box. Anything that's difficult or messy, they just skip it so that they can automate. It's a weaker offering at the end of the day," he says.

"Our main drive is to supply the highest quality intelligence. We have a human team that triages all the results before they actually go to the customer. If there is any kind of inconsistency, there is always a person that will look at it and confirm that this is true and accurate."

"It's not just AI making blind decisions in a box. We make sure to always incorporate the human element."

Get Serious About Your Brand Protection with ZeroFox

Don't wait until your brand is compromised. Implement robust counterfeit brand protection and fake review monitoring to preserve your reputation, protect your customers, and secure your business for the future.

By combining AI-powered detection with human expertise and a vast global network of enforcement partners, ZeroFox helps you stay ahead of bad actors and ensure your customers always experience the authentic value your business promises.To see ZeroFox in action and learn how our comprehensive platform can protect your brand, request a demo today.