Overview
Building up your brand, website and professional image is already a complex and costly task. If you become successful, unfortunately this also means that some will use this success as a way to fraudulently take money from others.
This is often with through a fake website or by using your images and passing them off as their own. When first discovered, this can often be very upsetting and distressing as it’s essentially theft so it’s the same feeling if something physical is stolen from you.
We have had our site, brand and images copied and fake copies used so we completely understand the frustration.
What can I do about it?
Unfortunately, as many of the websites are overseas it’s often a difficult and potentially costly exercise to stop. As a hosting provider, unfortunately unless the site was hosted on our platform there’s nothing we can actually do.
Seek legal advice
The issue is a legal one, so therefore requires specialist legal advice.
A lawyer who specialises in intellectual theft and brand protection will have expertise in dealing with these issues and therefore will know the likely outcomes as well.
Request removal from Google Search and Images
Images and search results within Google can be requested to be removed if you can easily show they’re a breach of copyright. This won’t completely solve the issue, but help limit the damage to your brand as a successful take-down will have the image and link removed from Google’s search database.
This can be a very time consuming task and isn’t always successful, so be prepared to spend hours filling the form out for each image and each link.
Form: Removing Content From Google
Investigate brand protection
If your brand is big enough, there are a number of service providers who provide continuous monitoring to alert you when these new fraudulent sites pop up. Many of them also have services which can be used to assist with removal.
At this stage, Conetix has not worked with any and therefore does not have a recommended list. We highly recommend talking to other business owners who have this protection and/or researching potential providers at length before engaging with them.