Have you been affected by fraud on the internet?

”One fraud every minute, around-the-clock throughout July 2018”

This is a quote that, while perhaps not pleasing to hear, is important to talk about. Every minute, 24-hours a day, someone became a victim of fraud in Sweden during July 2018.

Increased number of frauds on the internet.

The most recent figures from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande Rådet or BRÅ) show a 26% increase in reported financial crimes compared with July 2017 – and on top of that around half of all frauds affecting Swedes are not reported to the police. Many people don’t realize that they have been victims of fraud, so naturally there are more crimes of this nature going unreported. It’s hard to tell how deep the rabbit hole goes with this subject, but ”one fraud every minute” certainly doesn’t seem like an exaggeration.

From a company’s perspective, this increase in fraudulent activity makes it even more important to act, strategically and proactively, to monitor and protect how their trademarks and names are used digitally.

We wrote earlier about the increase in the number of domain related crimes, when we focused on the noticable rise in the number of hijacked domains. Peter Forsman, Abuse Manager at the IIS Registry, noted that hijacked domains – used to, for example, sell counterfeit or pirated goods – are affecting more and more people.

Another example of domain related crime is mail-fraud, something that we noticed a lot of last summer. This can involve the fraudulent use of a deliberately misspelled version of an email adress. An email could be sent from an adress very similar to that of the CEO to the financial department of a company, for example, asking them to make a payment. You can read more about mail fraud and how to best protect yourself and your company here.

So, what can trademark holders do to prevent financial crimes and make sure that their trademarks aren’t used improperly? We at Dotkeeper have some tips.

First, we recommend that you have a clear and logical strategy for working with your trademarks, names, and other important intellectual property. A good starting point is to make sure that your domain protection strategy is in line with your copyright protection and marketing strategies. Depending on the company, you might also think about how you deal with common variations or misspellings of the names of your company and its employees. Hyphenated names are especially important to consider.

Based on this strategy, you should secure the domain names that are important to your company, and from there take the suitable next step, for example, by fully registering those domains that are important to you but that aren’t yet protected.

In order to respond quickly to any infringements, you should consider registering your domain holdings with a domain monitoring service. Domain monitoring lets you check if your trademarks or important names are registered as domains by someone other than yourself. By intercepting these registrations quickly, you can minimize the damage.

Beyond this, SSL certificates are a good investment for securing your websites – both for you and your visitors. Through SSL certificates you ensure that the records your visitors leave behind when they visit your websites cannot be intercepted.

These are some tips on how to act to protect your business. There are more actions you can choose to make, but the tips above is a good way to start.

If you suspect that you or your company are vulnerable to fraud or if you want our experts to draw up a pro-active preventative strategy, don’t hesitate to get in touch at hej@dotkeeper.com  or call us on 040-613 09 00.