Consumers are not living their intended lifestyles as fraudsters are overly taking advantage of the loopholes of the internet. Following the massive surge in the number of people shopping online, more products and services that are best delivered online are being compromised. In this regard, consumers have to withdraw from some of the deals and, perhaps, direct their business dealings offline.
Businesses are suffering due to fraud, and their brand integrity is dwindling progressively. Brands want to clamp down on this issue immediately, which means efficient domain monitoring is essential for businesses to take certain instant action against fraud.
Nevertheless, just how badly is fraud affecting consumers and businesses?
Skurio’s Interactive Slider Shows £375M Fraud Loss in UK Businesses
A new interactive slider that you can see by clicking here for more information shows that the estimated daily cost of fraud costing the UK economy is £375,342,465, and on an annual basis, it is approximately £137,000,000,000.
People love to buy, and more people are now buying online than ever. And like the surging e-commerce transactions, the bad eggs, internet pests, the scammers are also surging in number and devising more and more defrauding techniques. This also means you must step up or be several steps ahead to defeat their aims.
As per the interactive slider, here are some of the most common consumer items that are being missed out from being purchased daily :
Round the World Flight Tickets – 75,068
PlayStation 5 – 834,112
Smartwatches – 990,349
Full Tanks of Petrol – 7,325,184
Family Packs of 16 Toilet Rolls – 44,157,937
Cinema Tickets – 55,606,291
Netflix Monthly Subscriptions – 62,661,513
Cups of Coffee – 136,488,169
Scammers Within and Outside the UK Evolving Tricks to Bypass Customers’ Intelligence
You must not relax because scammers are not. Behind the scenes, these ferocious humans are rethinking methods, patterns, and modes to bypass your customer’s intelligence.
Unfortunately, they also win. If scammers cannot phish customer A, they will phish customer B. And this trend continues until really bad reviews about your brand begin to pop internet-wide.
Scammers who use domain names similar to yours do so to perpetrate fraud, of course. They are after your consumers with multiple phishing techniques through emails, SMS, and phone. Meanwhile, suppose your backend details end up on the dark web. They can purchase such information as customer emails and phone numbers to phish.
In other cases, fraudsters can run fake giveaway campaigns in your name on various social platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, asking customers to send their contact information for rewards. Of course, your customers will share their details with them innocently, and the phishing, or say fishing, commences.
Businesses Can Be Kept Afloat With Swift Responses
Domain registrars and the governments cannot do all. There you are, your customers at the mercy of fraudsters, and yesterday, your team felt helpless, the manager paced the meeting room, or perhaps it was virtual, but all of it can be in the past now.
There are not one or two, but numerous things you can do to break the chain, setting consumers free so they can continue with their preferred lifestyles.
Begin by assessing the impersonation risk of your brand. Identify and prioritise assets, look out for threats and identify vulnerabilities. The next thing you want to do is to register appropriate top-level domains relevant to your brand. You can look out for phonetically and visually similar domains to register to discourage fraudsters.
Next, you can have your brand trademarked to give you the takedown edge when you must eliminate impostors. Trademarking your brand also justifies takedown requests and speeds up the rate at which you combat phishers/scammers.
You would also require a “concise and consistent” communications policy that guides your customers away from becoming fraud victims. Finally, you can complement these strategies by employing a continuous domain monitoring solution.
Domain Monitoring: A New Way to Outsmart Cyber Fraudsters
When a scammer targets your brand, they merely find close matches to your website by looking at typosquatting domain variations. In this regard, they are registering domain names that customers will mistakenly type in, and that leads them to that phishing site to steal their information.
With a working domain monitoring tool, these deceitful variations will be identified using intelligent algorithms that create a shortlist of the potentially fraudulent domains for further investigations.
A typical efficient domain monitoring tool can check several thousands of domain registrations each day to detect possible variants that the registerer might want to use against your brand policy in the future.
