What is brand impersonation?
Brand impersonation is the use of a brand's name, logo or imagery on an account, page or profile that the brand does not own, in a way that presents it as official or affiliated.
It ranges from the crude to the careful. At one end, an account copies the avatar and bio wholesale and runs a giveaway scam. At the other, a profile uses a plausible regional variant of the name — the brand plus a country code, or a support-desk handle — and answers customer complaints, which is where the real damage happens.
Impersonation is not the same as a trade mark dispute, although it often becomes one. Platforms run separate reporting routes for each: an impersonation or authenticity report turns on whether people are being misled about who is behind the account, while an intellectual property report turns on a registered right. The impersonation route is usually faster; the IP route is usually more reliable at volume.
Executive impersonation is a distinct class. Accounts in the name of a named leader are used for recruitment fraud and investment scams, and they rarely appear in monitoring scoped to the brand name alone.
Related terms
- TakedownA takedown is the removal of an infringing or impersonating account, post or page by the platform that hosts it, following a report the platform accepts.
- Digital risk protectionDigital risk protection is the practice of finding and removing the threats to a brand that sit outside its own network — on social platforms, in app stores, on look-alike domains and across the open web.
- TyposquattingTyposquatting is registering a near-match of a brand's domain or handle — a transposed letter, a missing character, a swapped top-level domain — to catch people who mistype the real one.
- Social engineering fraudSocial engineering fraud is a loss caused by deceiving a person into authorising a payment or handing over access, rather than by any technical compromise of a system.