Retail brands are under near-constant attack across digital channels. Fraudulent ads, fake social profiles, AI-generated websites, and spoofed mobile apps are increasingly used in coordinated counterfeit campaigns that hijack brand equity to steal consumer data and divert revenue. As ecommerce continues to grow — and AI-driven shopping assistants accelerate online transactions — the digital footprint of retail brands has never been more expansive or more vulnerable.
In this blog, we explore how to collect and operationalize threat intelligence to identify, prioritize, and neutralize the top risks facing retail brands today.
Fraudulent Ads: A Growing Digital Risk Surface
In 2025, fraudulent advertisements have become one of the most prolific and damaging forms of brand abuse, with global losses projected to exceed $150 billion annually. These deceptive ads — distributed via social platforms, search engines, and ad networks — mimic legitimate retail promotions to divert traffic, steal customer data, and erode brand trust. Sophisticated actors now leverage AI to generate realistic ad creatives, making detection harder and response windows shorter.
Retail brands are especially vulnerable. Attackers use scraped product imagery, brand-adjacent language, and spoofed domains to impersonate official campaigns, often without using logos or direct trademarks. This tactic complicates enforcement, as many platforms require overt brand elements to justify removal. Meanwhile, customers struggle to distinguish real offers from malicious lookalikes, and often fall victim before abuse is detected.
Fraudulent ads represent both a brand protection and cybersecurity issue. Malicious ads are not just a marketing problem as they drive traffic to credential phishing pages, fake checkout flows, and malware-laced mobile apps. The attack surface has outpaced manual enforcement and requires a proactive, intelligence-led approach.
Key elements of a modern defense strategy include:
- Automated monitoring: Leverage platform ad libraries and third-party tools to run continuous scans for brand-related terms, using exact and fuzzy matching across text, visuals, and domain names.
- AI-assisted detection: Use machine learning (ML) models trained to identify impersonation patterns, even when logos or trademarks are absent.
- Human-in-the-loop review: Expert analysts must validate suspicious creatives, inspect landing pages, and gather evidence for takedown submissions that meet evolving platform requirements.
- Domain threat intelligence: Flag suspicious URLs associated with ad campaigns, especially those using brand terms, recently registered domains, or known malicious infrastructure.
Fake Social Media Accounts: A Silent Threat to Brand Trust
In today’s social-driven economy, fake or misleading social media accounts have become a powerful tool for brand impersonation and consumer fraud. Before launching fraudulent ads or scams, threat actors often create or hijack social media pages that appear affiliated with well-known brands. Some of these pages are obvious fakes. Others are more subtle, using product photos, vague references, or scraped content to look legitimate while staying just under the radar of platform enforcement.
These accounts can mislead customers, promote counterfeit products, or direct users to phishing sites disguised as official brand channels. And because they often don’t use logos or trademarks, they’re harder to flag and remove, especially when they mimic, rather than directly copy, a brand’s identity.
The outcomes from fake social media accounts can be impactful:
- Confused customers may lose trust in your brand after falling victim.
- Counterfeiters divert real sales and damage brand reputation.
- Legacy or abandoned brand accounts can be weaponized if not monitored.
To protect the brand, organizations must take a proactive stance:
- Monitor social media at scale to identify fake or misleading pages using brand-related terms, product names, and visual similarities.
- Inspect suspect accounts manually to confirm misuse—especially those promoting offers, giveaways, or fake support services.
- Act quickly to report and remove fraudulent pages, ideally with support from platform partnerships or brand protection teams.
- Ensure ownership of all official brand accounts, even those not currently in use, to prevent impersonation.
As more consumers rely on social media to discover, engage, and shop with brands, even a single fake account can damage trust. Detecting and removing these threats early is essential, not just for brand protection, but for safeguarding customer relationships.
Stopping Counterfeit Websites Before They Damage Your Brand
Fraudulent ads often redirect victims to counterfeit websites that closely mimic legitimate storefronts. These fake sites commonly use look-alike domains, stolen branding, and unauthorized content to appear credible and carry out malicious activity. To detect and disrupt these operations, security teams should combine automated tools with human-led analysis to monitor the open web for brand abuse, unauthorized affiliation, and deceptive traffic diversion.
Look-alike domains are a key tactic used to impersonate trusted brands. To stay ahead of these threats, security teams should continuously track newly registered or active domains using data sources such as:
Domain registrars
SSL certificate transparency logs
Active DNS queries
Passive DNS intelligence
Once a malicious domain is confirmed, analysts should pivot from that domain to uncover related infrastructure by identifying other domains hosted on the same IP address. Associated IPs and name servers can further expose broader threat clusters tied to the original fraud.
Because threat actors often deploy evasion tactics like blocking known user-agents or filtering access based on device viewport security teams must use both automated and manual anti-evasion methods to gather site content. Every suspicious domain or webpage should be scored to distinguish real threats from harmless anomalies. Any confirmed unauthorized brand use must then be validated and its risk level assessed.
As retail and consumer brands face increasingly complex counterfeit campaigns, it’s essential for security teams to understand the threat landscape and the tactics attackers use. A blended approach leveraging automation and experienced analysts will ensure accurate threat identification and provide the evidence necessary for timely takedown actions.