It does not take long until a fraudster registers a domain similar to your e-commerce brand, which is known as typosquatting. Once the registration is complete, an activity that could follow next could be smishing or phishing campaigns that target customers’ personal information, payment credential harvesting, malware attack, and many more to mention.
You do not want to track these fake domains manually. Besides, some of these fraudulent domains prevent search engines from indexing their URLs so that even an online site search can’t discover their existence. As a solution, a reliable domain monitoring tool can protect not only your customers from scammers but also increase revenue and protect or sustain your brand reputation.
UK Economy Suffering Over £176,000,000 Per Year Without Domain Monitoring Solutions
Skurio reports the estimated fraud cost in the UK at over £176,000,0000 each year, which is massive on the UK economy. Unfortunately, more scammers are leveraging the ignorance of unsuspecting consumers to run their pockets dry. With tools designed for domain fraud monitoring, your organization can remove its name from the register of companies whose customers are prone to cyberattacks in their name, reducing the hit level on the UK economy.
Although you have no control over who registers a domain similar to your brand, it is your responsibility to ensure that your customers are protected from potential fraud.
Online Fraud on the E-commerce Industry
Also known as purchase fraud, e-commerce fraud is surging relentlessly. Digitalization is supposed to streamline processes, enhance efficiency and consolidate data. However, scammers are taking advantage of the loopholes to defraud customers at the expense of e-commerce retailers not taking preventive measures such as investing in domain monitoring tools.
The pandemic meant more businesses going virtual, and more and more companies are finding their foot online to remain in the competition and satisfy customers. Moreover, the Statista report shows 2.14 billion shoppers of online goods and services in 2021. This means a surge in online operations, and more customers prefer to transact online.
Scammers, on the other hand, are seeing reputable retailers as their gateway towards defrauding customers online. If retailers are not doing enough to protect the customers, it becomes easier for scammers to take advantage of these inefficient security protocols to scam.
Perhaps, many e-commerce businesses are unaware of how vulnerable they can be. Otherwise, more retailers would be flooding in to invest in domain monitoring to protect their customers and retail businesses in today’s customer-centric business world.
You should not feel reluctant to invest in domain name protection because you are at risk of exposing your business and customers to fraudsters without it. Digital fraud is quite common, and not many customers are attentive to detail when making purchases online. In addition, you do not want your business to receive negative reviews from people who never transacted with you but think they did.
What Informed Businesses Can Do to Fight Cybercriminals
Domain registration filtering is a way domain registrars can stop potential scams resulting from typosquatting. Unfortunately, so many domains are registered daily, which leaves your business responsible for monitoring how people use your brand identity, starting with registering similar domain names to yours.
Typosquatting is one such scam you want to eliminate. But, unfortunately, you can’t exactly tell what would be done with a domain name similar to your e-commerce domain name, and so you want to fight it in time.
As a preventive measure, you can do the following to fight against fraudsters that could use your domain for scams that diminish your reputation:
- First, make your brand a trademark to simply takedown processes.
- Monitor brand impersonation.
- Make sure to register top-level domains similar to your e-commerce brand name. It also prevents scammers from using it to scam through typosquatting.
- Teach your customers how to protect themselves and what your company will never request from them during transactions or making complaints.
The rule of thumb is to invest in continuous domain monitoring, which ensures the daily protection of your brand.
How Domain Monitoring Solutions Work to Filter Potentially Fraudulent Domains
When you invest in a domain monitoring solution, it searches a list of domain registrations since the last bot crawl. Then domains you find on the similar domain result page are determined by how you set your crawler to filter the search result. For example, you may be most interested in finding brands with your trademark or that appear quite similar to your trademark. The filtering of domain results is algorithmic, using boolean operators. Domain crawlers can also phonetically and visually detect brands similar to yours without entering the exact keyword of brands confusingly similar to yours.
How Your Retail Business Can Operate Safely When You Invest in Domain Monitoring
- Take legal actions. Domain monitoring offers support that lets you follow up the relevant legal proceedings against potentially fraudulent domains using your trademark.
- Discover a domain related to your brand. You can monitor for sites that could be using your brand or domain names similar to yours phonetically or visually. With this protection, you can create the right strategy that helps you fight against domain fraudsters.
- Acquire secondary market domains. Most reliable domain monitoring tools use automated systems that can discover domain names you can register to keep fraudsters from having them or securing them for fraud in the future. In this manner, you safeguard your consumers and ensure a better virtual retail business world.
