Prevent misuse of your company name or details

Are you dealing with a fraudster who is buying and selling on behalf of your company, sending fake invoices, requesting credit, or posing as your company on social media? Then you are a victim of business identity fraud, one of the fastest growing types of fraud in business. How do you prevent a scammer from assuming your identity and misusing your company name?

In business identity fraud, fraudsters act on behalf of your company. To do this, the scammers use the information they find on the internet about your company. Scammers also get data about you and your business via stealing confidential paper documents or a data breachBR. 

Preventing business identity fraud 

Protect your business from business identity fraud. Key measures you can take: 

• Set up a Google Alert for your company name. You will then be notified automatically whenever your company name is mentioned on the internet. That way, you can immediately see when a fraudster is creating a site under your name. 

• Handle company and personal data with care. 

• Check your public domain name details via Whois or SIDN. Ask your web hosting provider if they shield your sensitive information if possible. Think of (email) addresses, phone numbers, and employee names. Do leave the email address of a technical contact so that, for example, cybersecurity organisations can alert you to digital threats.

• Tell your staff about the risks of fraud (in Dutch), such as sharing confidential company data. 

• Establish an ICT policy with clear procedures and controls for storing and processing data. 

• Keep confidential documents in a safe place, such as a safe, and never leave them around, in bins or in meeting rooms. 

• Destroy old documents with a paper shredder. 

• Check the identity of your customers and staff. 

Online misuse 

If someone impersonates your company on social media (in Dutch), you can report it. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have a dedicated page on their websites for this purpose. They will investigate your report and block or delete the fake account. 

Is a fake website misusing your company name? Check who runs the site on whois.com. Then ask the administrator of the domain name to take the site offline. To do this, follow the steps in the notice-and-take-downprocedure. 

Example 

A fake online shop (in Dutch) claims to sell products such as baby milk, cleaning products, or copy paper under your company name. The unsuspecting buyer pays for a product but the criminal seller delivers nothing. Then you start getting angry calls from customers who think they have bought something from your company. 

Misuse of your company name is a criminal offence. So do file a report with the police. 

Invoice fraud 

Scammers can also use your business identity to send your customer a fake invoice (in Dutch). The fraudster sends a message with a fake invoice that looks like the invoice your customer already expects to receive. Criminals copy your logo, the look and feel, and even your signature so that they will seem trustworthy. Meanwhile, scam techniques have reached the point where scammers can replace a digital form on your website with a fake copy. This technique is known as formjacking. This allows the fraudster to acquire customer details, for instance, or to change a bank account number. That way, the payment your customer makes ends up in the account of a cybercriminal. 

Example 

Jacob van der Vis, business advisor on the KVK Advice Team, talks to business owners who have been the victims of fraud. A victim of invoice fraud reported the following: “For a foreign client, I had to prepare an invoice. For this order, I sent several emails to my contact. I then got a message that had a slightly different email address. This seemed to come from the client’s finance department. The naming, signature, and look and feel were the same as those in emails I had received from the contact I knew. No alarm bells went off for me, but it turned out afterwards that a criminal had interfered in our email traffic. Fortunately, I had also sent the invoice at the same time to the email address I already knew. My contact realised that I was simultaneously sending a copy of the invoice to a fake address. As a result, however, the criminal has a sample of an actual invoice with which they could also harass other customers of mine. In emails to my customers, scammers have used my name and corporate identity.” 

Has your identity been misused? 

Is a fraudster using your business details for online deception or to send fake invoices? Alert your customers, suppliers, and other partners. Business identity fraud is a criminal offence. Report it to the Fraud Helpdesk and file a report with the police.