Add On: Report A Fake

Counterfeits are replicas of real products. These are often produced with the intention to take advantage of the brand image among the brand’s customers to make money. Counterfeits cover fake produce of documents, currency, works of art, consumable products such as clothing, grocery, medicines, and hardware and software products.

In a world with an increasing number of frauds and counterfeits, the importance to protect oneself and one’s organization has become a need. To protect and act, one must be aware of such fraudulent activities by being open to receiving complaints, maintaining a record of them, identifying similarities, and setting up a process or workflow to take the required actions. Manually managing all these activities can be tedious and consumes a lot of time. A well-designed software such as Hubstream can help investigative teams manage all of this efficiently. 

Organizations and/or individuals often face a huge counterfeit problem in which their products or services are being duplicated and sold in the market by unknown people or groups. Such activities would not even come to the notice of the organization and/or individual until someone raises a complaint about the (fake) product or service being of poor quality. Situations like this lead to damage to goodwill, lack of trust, loss of customers, and legal and financial problems. Therefore, organizations have brand enforcement agents to take care of such issues.

The public or brand enforcement agents will report these incidents or products so that the organization can take appropriate actions. In situations like this, the customers would also like to give feedback to the organization on the poor-quality knockoffs or counterfeits.

Reporting a fake product can help prevent counterfeiting as it helps organizations get information from the public regarding those frauds and act immediately. These activities happen in the dark, so they need to be exposed to prevent them from happening further. Customers or brand enforcement agents should be able to easily report so that the brands can keep track of infringers and avoid damage

Monitoring software and AI solutions can help brands track where counterfeit products are available online. Hubstream connects other templates to reports submitted by consumers using monitoring software. Organizations should also look out for sophisticated marketing techniques such as false advertising, and black hat SEO.

Organizations can educate their customers and make them aware of the counterfeit products and websites that sell those products and then link back to report a fake form. The brand can make the customers aware through social media, emails, and blogs about where these products are often sold, what to look out for, and what actions to take when they come across one. They can ask them to look out for any changes in the logo, spelling, and other product information and report the same.

One fake product is enough to cause damage to the goodwill and trust the brand has created. So, such fake products must be reported, brought to notice, and taken care of. Similarly, managing this data manually will take a lot of time during which time, these fake products will intervene in the market with 10X speed. So, the sooner the action lesser the damage. To reduce the time taken and perform efficiently, organizations can adopt the use of case management software. Having case management software eases work, ensures control, and allows one to focus on other important things. It also makes it easy to give consumers an outlet for submitting complaints related to fake products, where the brand is part of the solution.

Hubstream ONE’s reporting a fake template is perfect for receiving and managing reports of counterfeits from consumers or brand enforcement agents. It allows investigators to receive reports of suspected fake products from consumers or brand enforcement agents, triage and assign action, understand, and analyze trends to identify problem areas.