A counterfeit listing can be buried on page 20 or page 100 of a marketplace and still generate sales. For a long time, cleaning the first pages of marketplace search was an important way to measure brand protection success, and it still matters. But search position does not tell you how much exposure a listing is actually getting. Bad actors can send consumers directly to listings through social media ads, posts, browser ads, private groups, and other external channels. A counterfeit may be almost invisible in marketplace search while still receiving traffic and transactions from somewhere else. That changes what brands need to look at. Marketplace visibility remains important, but so does understanding how consumers are actually reaching the infringement. Daniel Shapiro explains how counterfeiters use distribution to stay out of sight while continuing to sell.

It’s officially back-to-school season, and scammers know it. Historically, this has been a peak sales period for several industries. Bad actors use every tactic in the rulebook to ride that wave and profit from parents and students looking for deals. The rulebook itself has not changed much over the years. What has changed is the speed, scale, and sophistication of the scams, mainly because of AI. Scammers take advantage of urgency, budget pressure, and the fact that back-to-school shopping often happens across many different channels at once. Fake listings can hide in plain sight on marketplaces. Suspicious ads can appear on the platforms people scroll every day. Fake accounts can offer deals that look believable. Phishing links can arrive through emails, texts, private groups, and messaging apps. That is what makes the issue harder to contain. To catch more of these scams, brands need visibility across ecommerce channels, ads, social platforms, and messaging environments. And customers need clear reminders to slow down, check the source, and be careful with deals that look too good. #BacktoSchool #BrandProtection #AIAgaintsAI

Counterfeit selling is moving closer to the places where people already discover, trust, and buy products. Livestreams. Creator audiences. Private chats. Short-lived social posts. The product may be fake, but the distribution is very real. Earlier this year, UK officers seized over $2.7 million in counterfeit merchandise and another $1.3 million in clothing believed to be stolen from a warehouse-style operation. According to reports, suspects were livestreaming from the setup, answering viewer questions and presenting fake luxury products as genuine. In a separate case, a British lifestyle influencer was ordered to pay damages after selling counterfeit luxury goods to over 32,000 social followers. Different cases, but the same signal. #BrandProtection #Counterfeits

Why does unlimited enforcement matter in brand protection? Because seasonality happens. Holiday season. Product launches. Promotions. High-traffic sales moments. And when teams are already focused on the business, the last thing they need is to decide whether they can afford to expand enforcement. That is where a flat-fee model changes the equation. Brands can keep acting when volume increases, without having to slow down, reprioritize every case, or worry that more fake websites means more cost. In this video, our clients share what that looks like in practice: 130+ hours of manual work saved in one quarter. Unlimited takedowns under the same fee. Approximately $200M worth of fake products removed. Because when counterfeiters scale, enforcement needs to scale with them.

When you find one counterfeit, there is a good chance it is not the only one. And there is a good chance it is not only on one channel. Bad actors know that distribution matters just as much as the scam itself. They may use a marketplace listing to capture demand, a fake website to look legitimate, and social media ads to drive traffic. That is what makes brand protection so complex today. As Daniel Shapiro explains in his conversation with Greg Kihlström on The Agile Brand, brands are now being attacked from multiple parts of the ecommerce journey. Monitoring and acting across those channels is critical. Not only to protect revenue, but to protect the trust a brand has worked so hard to build.

Between two and four billion new items can appear across ecommerce sites, marketplaces, social media, and standalone websites in a single day. It takes an ecosystem of brands, platforms, technology providers, and enforcement partners to tackle that volume effectively. Your own team brings knowledge others may not have: the full catalogue, authorized sellers, discontinued products, genuine colours, and what should never appear online. Technology helps monitor and enforce at scale. Platforms need brand knowledge and infringement data to improve their detection systems and prevent more listings from going live in the first place. Then there is customer education, collaboration with customs and law enforcement, and advocating for legislation that better protects IP and consumers. Brand protection is getting broader. Working in isolation only leaves more gaps. In this clip from The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®, Daniel Shapiro explains why brands, platforms, and technology providers must collaborate to protect brands effectively. Full episode below.

Why does brand protection need technology today? Daniel Shapiro talked about this on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström. With the size of ecommerce today, millions of listings can appear across marketplaces, websites, and social channels. Expecting a team to monitor all of that manually is simply not realistic anymore. For more of Daniel’s perspective on where brand protection is heading, listen to the full episode! Link below.

It’s easy to talk about automation in brand protection. Because it matters. The volume is too high and the channels move too fast. But speed needs direction. Someone has to understand the brand. Know how each platform works. Decide what to prioritize. Spot when a case is part of something bigger. That’s the part customers feel over time. Technology helps you move faster. People help you move smarter.

Manual processes don’t fail overnight. They become harder to sustain as volume and speed increase. What once felt manageable starts to stretch resources, delay responses, and reduce visibility. That’s the pattern we see across brands. As threats scale, the challenge moves beyond detection to maintain consistent control. The experiences shared by FILA, Cotopaxi, and Burton reflect that shift. From handling cases one by one to needing a system that operates continuously.

Ask five people in brand protection how they got there, and you’ll get five different answers. People come from legal, investigations, marketing, policy, academia… That’s part of what makes the field so unique. In this episode of Heroes of Brand Protection, Kari Kammel shares how this diversity of experience shapes the way we approach brand protection globally. Watch the episode now. Link below.