Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Designers and trade experts have noticed a rise in the counterfeiting of non-luxury brands according to a recent article titled, “Economic Indicator: Even Cheaper Knockoffs." The article indicates that non-luxury and lesser targeted brands are being heavily counterfeited alongside Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton.
It should not come as a big ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking, Counterfeit, Scams | No Comments »
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Since March 2010, and especially this month, the MarkMonitor Security Operations Center (SOC) has noticed a significant increase in the use of free web hosting services for phishing and malware attacks. Cybercriminals are using free hosting services to either host the phishing and malware sites themselves or redirect to fast-flux ...
Posted in Brandjacking, Phishing, Security, malware | No Comments »
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Chanel’s warning to counterfeiters: "we are watching and we are taking action." That’s the literal message you will see when visiting around 40 websites that used to sell counterfeit goods (such as mychanelshop.com) that now redirect to the Chanel-owned website chanelreplica.com. These domains were transferred to Chanel as a result ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking, Counterfeit | No Comments »
Monday, June 21st, 2010
Beginning this month, MarkMonitor will be sharing a new, monthly Fraud Intelligence Report with customers and other interested parties in our blog. The goal of the report is to provide timely analysis of developing trends and new threats in the fraud landscape. The Fraud Intelligence Report will complement the current ...
Posted in Brandjacking, Phishing, Security, malware | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
According to a CNN article, in less than 24 hours following the September 2009 release of Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Lost Symbol, pirated versions were discovered on file sharing sites, such as RapidShare and BitTorrent. Within days, the book had been illegally downloaded more than 100,000 times. As of ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking, Piracy | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
In the past few months, a flurry of gift card scams leveraging such high-profile brands as Best Buy, Whole Foods and IKEA have emerged on Facebook. These scams often use the brand’s logo, website URL, or general “look and feel” on Facebook “fan” pages to give the impression that these ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking, Phishing, Social Media, Trademarks, malware | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
Online fakes can be a lucrative business and difficult to crack down on, due to the ease and low-cost of setting up multiple virtual storefronts and the ability to obfuscate an operation’s identity. A federal lawsuit filed on March 1, 2010 by Polo Ralph Lauren and VF Corp. illustrates these ...
Posted in Brand Abuse, Brandjacking, Counterfeit, Trademarks | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
According to the latest figures released Monday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, online advertising last year reached $23.4 billion. While the rates of growth for online advertising are slowing, companies are still making considerable investments in online search marketing, which accounts for close to half of all online ...
Posted in Brandjacking, Domains, Trademarks | No Comments »
Thursday, September 18th, 2008
As part of our recent study of the online pharmaceutical market we decided to make some prescription drug purchases from some of the uncertified online pharmacies that we identified in the study.
Analyzing the purchase details and the product that was shipped to us in this example raises troubling questions ...
Posted in Brandjacking | 2 Comments »
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
We released the Summer 2008 edition of our Brandjacking Index earlier this week. You can download a copy of the report here. We publish this report to shed light on the variety of brand abuses that target leading brands and to demonstrate how those abuses can harm the public as ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
