Social media in 2025 is more than a marketing channel. It’s the front line of brand visibility and customer trust. While it drives awareness, sales, and real-time engagement, it also creates new vulnerabilities. Threat actors are exploiting these platforms with AI-generated content, deepfakes, and look-alike accounts to hijack brand credibility, erode trust, and launch increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.
What is Social Media Brand Impersonation?
Brand impersonation on social media usually takes one of three forms:
1. Direct impersonation
Often called brandjacking, direct impersonation typically shows up as fake social media accounts. With nothing more than an internet connection and an email address, cybercriminals can spin up accounts on nearly any platform in minutes, and that’s exactly what they do.
These imposter accounts mimic official brand profiles by copying logos, banner images, and bios. Once active, they post updates, join conversations, use brand slogans and hashtags, and even reply to customer questions on legitimate posts. Because social media thrives on speed and quick consumption, many users don’t pause to verify authenticity, making it dangerously easy for fake accounts to pass as real.
2. False or misleading brand mentions
If creating a fake account is easy, piggybacking on a brand’s reputation is even easier. Cybercriminals often drop the names of trusted companies or public figures in posts, ads, or messages to suggest endorsement where none exists. This tactic has been used to sell bogus products, erode brand credibility, and spread malware.
Because most users scroll quickly without verifying sources, these low-effort social engineering ploys can be surprisingly effective.
3. Sale of counterfeit goods or services
Everyone knows about knock-off merchandise. In the physical world, most people can spot a cheap imitation or at least know they’re buying one.
Online, it’s a different story. Criminals can use authentic product images, polished websites, and convincing social media accounts to make counterfeit goods look legitimate. For unsuspecting buyers, the deception often isn’t obvious until the product arrives — and by then, it’s too late.
Why It Matters
Brand impersonation today isn’t a question of if, it’s a matter of when.
Unlike knockoff handbags or street-corner fakes, online impersonation operates on a global scale with instant reach and far higher stakes. Fake social media accounts, for example, don’t just embarrass organizations — they can overshadow the real ones. After the Deepwater Horizon spill, a parody BP account gained twice the followers of BP’s official page, showing just how fast brands can lose control of their own story.
And the risks go well beyond bad PR. Imposters lure customers into phishing schemes, harvest credentials, steal payment data, and spread malware all under the cover of a trusted name. The result? Damaged reputation, broken trust, and long-term brand erosion.
What Can Brands Do About It?
Brand impersonation on social media isn’t disappearing—and platforms aren’t keeping pace. Even the biggest networks struggle to manage fake political accounts, so fraudulent business profiles often fall to the bottom of the priority list. If major players can’t keep up, you can bet smaller sites, niche forums, auction platforms, and paste bins aren’t doing much at all.
That means the responsibility falls to organizations themselves. Protection starts with proactive monitoring: continuously scanning for impersonation, counterfeit sales, and fraudulent accounts, then moving quickly to take them down. And it can’t be left solely to marketing. Effective defense requires a coordinated approach spanning hundreds of digital and social channels from mainstream platforms to fringe communities. Monitoring should be tuned to detect the threats that matter most, whether that’s fake customer support pages, executive impersonation, or non-parody brand abuse.
At Fortra Brand Protection, our Digital Risk Protection solution helps organizations stay ahead of attackers with end-to-end visibility and rapid takedown across email, mobile apps, domains, social media, and the open, deep, and dark web.
