Mediaboss Marketing

The 2020 COVID pandemic forced businesses to double down on their digital investments as in-person moved online. Brands refined and upped their marketing investments across digital channels email, websites, social media, apps, and advertising to serve their customers along their digital buying journeys. And while we were all focusing on managing life in the face of these shifts, malicious actors demonstrated once again that they are quick studies as they increased their investment in these same digital channels to promote their illicit activities on the strength of famous brands.

These highly-organized bad actors modeled their abuse networks by infringing upon the trademarks, brand names, hashtags, slogans, and even web page text used by the brands they target. To weave their schemes, they used the same promotional vehicles and digital assets as the targeted brands we all love. They built websites and apps, registered related URLs, social profiles, and pages to promote themselves. And in the case of counterfeit and grey-market goods, they created seller profiles and marketplace listings.

These sophisticated abuse networks appear 'friendly' to their victims, often including customer service chat and bots. Bad actors even take advantage of the latest advances in Martech (marketing technology) to conduct powerful customer or more accurately, victim acquisition strategies, using tracking pixels on their web pages and 'retargeting' ads across the web to reinforce their messages.

In short, economically-motivated bad actors apply modern digital marketing strategies and technology to conduct systemic brand abuse and take advantage of consumers using the most loved brands as bait.

To understand the scope of systemic brand abuse, the Appdetex team used our patent-pending Appdetex Tracer technology to profile these highly-organized networks of bad actors.

On average:

We examined a variety of industries, too, and found that, while no sector was immune, the highest incidence of abuse occurred in gaming, music and media, social networks, and, surprisingly, transportation industries. With the rise of COVID, consumers have increasingly relied upon delivery services, making the transportation category a larger target for bad actors.

The advent of domain name privacy and proxy services as well as privacy regulation and technologies, have had the unintended consequence of enabling bad actors to hide their identities. As malicious actors learned how they are being tracked, they began using multiple obfuscation layers to make it harder to find their operations and dismantle them.

To solve this problem, we developed Appdetex Tracer. This patent-pending investigative technology uses advanced crawling, scraping, and automated analytics tools to find the unseen digital links between sites, ads, listings, social networking handles, and apps used by these sophisticated networks of bad actors. These links, or Traces, can be as simple as publicly available domain registration data or as subtle as the security, customer service, or marketing and customer service technology providing the criminal network's infrastructure.

Traces link the individual elements of a brand abuse gambit, whether those elements are a marketplace listing, a website, a social media profile, an ad, or an app. We refer to these elements as nodes.

Traditional brand protection technologies rely on scanning to identify the nodes of a network, and they exclude the linkages and discovery of related abuse. As a result, brand protection professionals who use these legacy technologies are able to pursue enforcement for the individual nodes but are unable to identify related abuse, leaving large swaths of criminal operations in place and continuing to profit from the targeted brand. A considerable proportion of these unidentified nodes are part of a criminal network, and these networks are often very damaging to brands over long periods.

Our survey findings are based on the confirmed abuse and resulting enforcement of more than 100,000 online infringement cases and instances of abuse over a one-year period. Among the industries included in the study were Music & Media, Transportation, Retail, Gaming, Communications, Healthcare, and others.

We used our patent-pending Appdetex Tracer technology to investigate these instances of infringement. With Appdetex Tracer, we were able to map the networks, document the connection points, or 'traces,' and identify additional network nodes. As a result, we were able to uncover additional related abuse networks targeting the industries in the study.

To find out more about modern brand protection, you can request a demo here.

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Brand Abuse is Systemic: The Role of Networks in Brand Abuse - CircleID