A fraudster setting up a domain similar to yours is a few steps away from diverting your customers to victimise them. Unfortunately, you have no control or idea about what a scammer could be pulling with your brand name, and almost no customer may report the problem, except that bad reviews suddenly pop on your dashboard.

However, your business has an opportunity to change the story against domain fraud—investing in an excellent domain monitoring solution that works daily to protect your brand and eliminate fraudsters using your brand to perpetrate fraud.

The UK Economy is Begging to Escape the Grip of Fraud

Skurio released a report estimating the current adverse effect of fraud on the UK economy at more than £176,000,0000 every year. Fraudsters are not relenting efforts, meaning that without a domain monitoring solution that works 24/7, your customers could become casualties of internet fraud. Perhaps, you can’t even tell the number of fake websites already running riots in your name, defrauding everyone and everything that has to do with your business.

You might think it is not your responsibility to protect customers from becoming victims on these fake websites. The reality, however, is that your business suffers the adverse effect – you lose customers, wreck your brand reputation and experience a sharp decline in revenue.

Is the Government Doing Anything to Protect Your Business and Customers?

Yes, the government is doing its best to protect residents. Unfortunately, whatever the government could be doing is not enough to clamp down on unauthorised users of domains similar to your trademark for potential scams starting with typosquatting, which leads to smishing, pharming or phishing.

In essence, the government can’t do enough. The internet is more of a free world, and not many laws can keep fraudsters from doing their thing. For the love of customers, you want to ensure their safety, get them to return for more businesses, and refer new people to your business.

How Exactly Does Monitoring Your Domain Impact Your Business?

Top and fast-growing brands are the common targets fraudsters trail to scam uninformed customers. Domain fraud has evolved massively, and like customers, scammers are becoming even smarter.

When a particular scamming method is busted or exposed to customers to protect themselves, scammers invent new ways or remodel existing methods to get away with scamming. For instance, phishing attacks on Amazon can remain credible to a customer from the point of clicking the malicious URL to the final point of providing the targeted credentials.

You do not want scammers to destroy your brand trust and reputation built over many years. When a customer is scammed, frustration is thrown at your business, and bad reviews hurt your brand.

It can take a few hours to lose what you developed over the years. With an intelligent domain monitoring tool, this can’t be your story.

Monitor and takedown parked domains. Parked domains that replicate your domain name visually or phonetically may be used in the future to haunt your customers. Unfortunately, it is a ‘may’ because you can’t tell whether the domain owner is sincere or insincere.

Nevertheless, suppose an honest user registered the domain and parked it, and it expires. An insincere person or a criminal can register it to use for fraud under your company’s name. To avoid bad stories, a domain fraud protection tool can request a takedown.

Manually looking for registrations takes time, and you may be unable to discover fake domains using similar names as yours to defraud your customers. Also, some of these phishing domains can block search engines from indexing them, which makes it difficult to detect domain names using your brand name fraudulently if you decide to perform a manual site search online.

With many of your employees working remotely, and more customers seeking services online, you want to focus on delivering an excellent customer experience and improving the business. At the same time, an automated domain monitoring tool performs fraudulent domain name detection.

Tips to Safeguard Your Domain Preventatively

You can start by having a clear policy to secure your domain. Your policy can mention that your business has only one website, you will never send your customers unsolicited emails with potentially malicious links, and many more. When fraudsters contact your customer, they will recall your policy and ignore the phishing messages.

You can trademark your domain, brand, products, logos, and straplines. When you detect domains using phonetically or visually similar domains, you request and win a takedown easily.

You can also register domains similar to your branded domain. Ensure to register top-level domains relevant to the country you are targeting, for instance, your domain name + .co.uk.

The mother of all tips is to invest in a domain monitoring solution. A competent domain monitoring tool can fight typosquatting, keeping your business from being an umbrella for scammers who defraud innocent internet users.

Final Thoughts

Although a domain monitoring tool is one of the impactful ways to fight domain fraud, an inefficient tool would still leave your business vulnerable. You want a flexible monitoring tool that does not limit you to searching for a single domain URL.

Otherwise, you’ll miss new fake domains sprouting to scam your customers. Additionally, check to ensure that the new domain registration source feeds your domain monitoring solution use are reputable and accurate