Practical Solutions for Brand Protection Against Holiday Scams

The holiday season is a great time for a well-deserved break. But this is also the best time of year for scammers, presenting a golden opportunity to exploit increased spending and reduced vigilance. As we’ve explored in the first three parts of our ‘Holiday Shopping Scam Series’, these bad actors are relentless, targeting brands with innovative tactics that trap eager consumers quickly and evade detection.

In Part IV, we will explore practical solutions tailored to small and large brand protection teams to combat these scams.

Partner with Cybersecurity Teams

As highlighted in part III of the holiday scam series, scammers leverage advanced tools like VPNs, proxies, and residential IPs to mask their identities for fraudulent activities such as account takeover, account opening fraud and payment fraud during the busy holiday season. They also deploy bots to automate scams like gift card cracking and create counterfeit listings.

Brand protection teams can work closely with cybersecurity teams to identify suspicious VPN or proxy connections by conducting behavioral analysis on real-time data and detecting any irregular patterns. Even if a compromised device is newly added to the proxy server, cybersecurity teams can swiftly identify it and prevent fraudulent activities on your website or app with high accuracy.

Proactive Scam Prevention Strategies

During the holiday season, retailers often hire numerous part-time workers to help manage the increased demand. It is essential to coordinate fire drills and scam awareness training for both full-time and part-time staff, particularly in busy retail environments where point-of-sale scams or returns fraud may take place.

Providing this awareness training enhances employees’ ability to recognize and report fraudulent activity, ultimately reducing the costs and duration of scams.

Collaboration with Marketing Teams

Brand protection teams can leverage insights from marketing teams to enhance fraud detection. They can anticipate how scammers might mimic legitimate campaigns by understanding planned holiday sale campaign parameters such as promotion details, discount structures, ad copy like “limited time only,” and targeted audiences.

In part II, we highlighted how scammers used fake Facebook ads mimicking The North Face’s Black Friday campaign, offering deep discounts of up to 80%. A closer collaboration with marketing could have flagged the inconsistency between the fake ads and the brand’s actual promotions and identified mismatched URLs like “Northfacecoat.shop.”

Collaboration with Customer Success Teams

Customer success teams are often the first to hear about scam-related complaints, such as fake order confirmations, phishing attempts, or counterfeit products. These real-time insights can help brand protection teams quickly identify emerging threats and refine detection parameters. For example, as highlighted in part I, scammers exploit consumer trust by mimicking legitimate customer communications for shipping notifications or order updates. A timely collaboration can reduce the spread of such scams at the initial communication level before significant damage is done.

Consumer Awareness Efforts

Bad actors exploit consumers’ eagerness for holiday discounts, targeting their lack of awareness as an entry point for scams. Educating consumers to spot red flags in online deals and fake promotions reduces the risk of scams and eases the workload on brand protection teams. However, despite extensive consumer awareness campaigns and warnings from the FBI and brands, holiday scam losses continue to rise, with the FTC reporting a $1 billion increase in scam losses within 2022 to 2023.

The main reason consumers continue to fall into scams is not only caused by the human nature to seek out good deals during the holiday season, but also by the constantly evolving tactics used by scammers.

Advanced Investigation Management Tools

To combat this growing threat, brand protection teams need advanced investigation tools such as Hubstream with the following capabilities:

As the holiday season ends, carrying forward the lessons learned is essential. By analyzing seasonal trends, addressing protection gaps, and implementing advanced investigation tools like Hubstream, brands can prepare for future threats and remain vigilant, even during the busiest time.