The first sign is usually a support email. "I ordered from your site three weeks ago and nothing arrived." You check the order number. It doesn't exist. It was never your site.
By the time a customer complains, the clone has been live for a month, ranked for your brand name, and taken payments from people who will blame you for it. Finding that first is security work, not PR.
What We Look For
Lookalike and typosquatted domains. Registrations that swap a letter, add a hyphen, or move your brand to a different extension. Monitored continuously, not once a quarter.
Cloned storefronts and phishing pages. Full copies of your site — your photography, your product copy, your logo — built to take card details. These are the ones that cost money and trust.
Impersonation accounts. Fake profiles on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and X. Including the ones that DM your followers with a "you've won" message.
Executive impersonation. Fake profiles of your founder or leadership, used for investment scams, fake recruitment, and supplier fraud against your own staff.
Paid search abuse. Affiliates, resellers, and competitors bidding on your brand terms. You're paying more for your own name than you should be.
Counterfeit listings. Marketplace sellers using your product images and brand name.
Exposed credentials. Company logins surfacing in breach data — the raw material for the next impersonation.
Finding It Is the Easy Half
Plenty of tools send alerts. Alerts don't remove anything.
We handle removal: abuse complaints to registrars and hosting providers, platform impersonation reports through the channels that actually get read, Google Ads trademark complaints, marketplace takedown filings, and evidence packages your lawyers can use if it escalates. Every case is documented — screenshots, WHOIS records, timestamps, hosting details — so it holds up if you need it to.
Most takedowns land within days. Some need legal pressure and take weeks. We tell you which is which when we open the case, rather than filing and hoping.
Then We Make It Harder
Takedowns are reactive. The rest of the work isn't.
- Defensive registration of the highest-risk domain variants
- DMARC, SPF and DKIM taken to enforcement, so your domain can't be spoofed in email
- Trademark records filed with the ad platforms and marketplaces that honour them
- A reporting path your support team can actually use when a customer flags something
- Continuous monitoring reviewed by a named person, not a dashboard nobody opens
Why Aragil
We run the ad accounts. We watch the analytics. That means we usually see brand abuse as an anomaly before it surfaces as a complaint — branded search volume shifting, click costs climbing on terms you've always owned cheaply, referral traffic from a domain you've never heard of.
A monitoring vendor sees a new domain registration. We see what it's doing to your acquisition numbers.
Questions We Get Asked
How fast can a fake site come down?
Depends entirely on the host and registrar. Cooperative providers act within 24–72 hours of a documented report. Providers in jurisdictions that ignore complaints can take weeks and sometimes need legal escalation. We tell you which category a case falls into when we open it.
Subscription or one-time project?
Both exist. Most brands start with a one-time sweep to see what's already out there. The sweep almost always finds enough to justify the monitoring.
Do you handle trademark registration?
No — we work with your counsel. But enforcement is significantly stronger when you hold a registered mark, so if you don't, that's the first thing we'll tell you.
Ready to take the first step?
