020 7193 4905

Brand Protection Solutions

Assessing risk and eliminating organised counterfeit crime

Our Brand Protection Solutions remove counterfeit products from the web

Across the internet, thieves and pirates are stealing your designs and your ideas, marketing cheaply made counterfeit copies of your products to line their own pockets. They ignore regulatory requirements regarding safety, sometimes resulting in harm to purchasers. Often purchasers may be unaware that the goods they have bought are fake, causing your brand reputational loss in the market, on top of the loss of sales. Very often, these counterfeit goods are marketed via websites, which are also carefully produced copies of your own, but which channel funds from purchases to their own bank accounts.

Our Internet Governance Solution for individual brands determines the current threats to your intellectual property to effectively protect your on-line presence, reducing revenue loss, improving your brand reputation and improving customer trust in your brand.

We achieve this by completing in-depth research into known risks to your brand from the websites and organised criminal networks that are targeting them. This includes monitoring any new websites that are registered with either your various brand names or those that are found using in-house specialist search software, thereby reducing and often eliminating entirely the threat to your brand.

Any websites that we locate are risk assessed using our own Harm Matrix and then we prepare an action plan to deal with the threat. Each website that is targeted is carefully examined in an evidentially sound manner, affording you the option of pursuing further legal remedies to recover costs of lost sales on top of the take-down of the offending counterfeit web site.

Case study

First Response was instructed to act for a well known watch maker to deal with a number of websites that were targeting their brand with counterfeit goods. Whilst the brand was able to identify a small number of what appeared to be different websites and registrants, First Response was able to identify the Organised Criminal Network (OCN) behind the majority of the websites identified by the client and also link a large number of other unknown websites that had been registered by the same OCN that were also targeting the brand.

After identifying the threat, we worked with the client to risk assess all of the websites that were targeting the brand and removed the highest risk websites from global DNS (the Domain Name Service which converts website names to actual servers) within ten working days, effectively knocking them off the internet. 

 

The remaining websites were also suspended when their perceived risk increased or as directed by the client.

We are constantly monitoring the local country level domain networks where the client has a presence as well as the global domain networks, removing any infringing websites as soon as they appear.

The web is now virtually clear of websites selling counterfeit goods that target this particular brand and we continue to pro-actively monitor this (and many others) space. The client has noted an increase in sales and a drop in claims related to fake goods.
 

Don’t fall victim to counterfeit sales of your product – call First Response for help on 020 7193 4905