Building your brand is hard work. You have to establish a name for yourself, build trust in what you offer, and generate (and keep!) a following of loyal customers who believe in your brand’s promise.

But what happens when, through no fault of your own, that promise is breached?

Domain infringement is a very real problem for brands in the digital age. It has become all too easy for malicious actors to impersonate your brand online, which has a direct effect on your revenue, trust, traffic to your site and your brand’s reputation.

Fortunately, if you have been targeted by a fake domain and need to know how to shut down a website, BrandShelter can help.

What Domain Infringement Looks Like

Domain infringement can take many forms, including cybersquatting and fake or impersonation domains. Cybersquatting typically involves someone beating you to the punch in terms of registering your desired domain name, or variations on your domain name, which they then intend to sell on to you at a profit.

However, some cybersquatters aren’t in it for the money: a somewhat famous instance of this was the case of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who used the domain peta.org. They faced a situation where a man named Michael Doughney bought the domain peta.com and reused the PETA acronym to stand for “People Eating Tasty Animals” instead – utterly antithetical to the group’s actual purpose.

Typosquatting, is another type of cybersquatting, which involves malicious actors using a URL very similar to, but not quite the same as your website, in order to direct traffic that should be yours to their site. Here’s an example: if you’re a teapot seller and your domain name is teapots.com, they could typosquat by calling their site teapotts.com, teaspots.com, or other variations on the name. Google has run into this issue before, with typosquatters using gooogle.com as their erroneous URL of choice.

Another way in which typosquatters can abuse your domain name is by using two V’s instead of a W, or a capital I instead of a lowercase L, as the site then looks correct even though it is not. Can you tell the difference between water.com and vvater.com at a first glance? How about letters.co.uk vs Ietters.co.uk? As we’ve mentioned before, brands with the letter M in their URL should be on particularly high alert!

Some fraudulent or scam sites simply steal your brand identity for their own ends, usually to steal user information such as email addresses or even banking login details. Cybercriminals exploit domain confusion for a number of reasons, most of which are nefarious and, ultimately, damaging to your brand.

Domain Infringement is Not Just an Inconvenience

While there are humorous examples of cybersquatting that are more irritating for those affected than actively damaging, generally speaking the motives are malicious and the outcomes are negative. You stand the very real risk of reputational damage to your brand when your intended visitors encounter misinformation, or even scams on these false websites. As these visitors may think the fake website is your brand, the result is an erosion of trust in your brand promise and a drop off in sales and client engagement when they do not return to your digital addres, and advise their associates to avoid you as well.

Additionally, you face a potential loss of revenue through traffic and therefore sales being diverted away from your site long term. It is possible for website clones to end up outranking your site on search engines, making you, the legitimate brand, more difficult to discover. There are also considerable legal and operational costs involved when it comes to getting these domain thieves to take down their false website.

Can I Get a Website Taken Down Myself?

Working out how to take down a website by yourself, while possible, may be more trouble than it’s worth in terms of operational and legal costs. For one, takedowns often require legal, technical and platform engagement on an expert level. You can make use of simple Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) reports, which can offer a speedy means of removing infringing content. However, DMCA takedown requests don’t really address deeper copyright issues: since a DMCA notice only removes a specific URL, it does not prevent the same user from re-uploading the content somewhere else. 

In addition, DMCA reports and notices cannot be used for anything other than copyright violations. That means things like defamation, libel, privacy violations, or trademark infringement are not covered. 

Informal abuse reports can also be used to address malicious, illegal, or infringing websites, though they too have their limitations. While faster than formal legal processes, they lack legal authority, which means they are usually handled at the discretion of the platform’s trust and safety teams. Like a DMCA notice, they cannot prevent the content from being uploaded again somewhere else. Manually requesting the shut down of a website is, frankly, just too slow and time consuming.

The costs involved in taking down a website in your personal capacity are extensive. The legal costs alone can easily run into the hundreds of thousands when it comes to court litigation and arbitration. However, it’s the ongoing reputational damage and loss of revenue through traffic diversion that will continue as long as the false website remains active, as well as the cost of in-house manpower it takes to find, document, and handle domain takedowns, that can be even more costly long term.

It’s not just about the time it will take you and your team to find, report, and manage the takedown process. It’s about the opportunity cost of everything else you should really be handling and working towards in the meantime.

How Should I Get a Website Shut Down?

Fortunately, you do not have to handle a website shut down by yourself. BrandShelter can help you to take down any website or domain name that’s damaging your business. Our approach to getting a website taken down involves the following steps:

First, share the details of the harmful or infringing content through our simple request form. Once you have submitted your request, we get started quickly. Our specialists will assess the case to confirm legal grounds, and determine the most effective takedown approach.

We then initiate the appropriate enforcement action, such as a DMCA notice, formal legal request, or direct contact with the infringing party, actively tracking the progress of the website takedown. Once the content is taken down, we will let you know and provide confirmation for your records.

Trust the Takedown Experts

The biggest benefit of handing your domain takedown needs to BrandShelter is that you can trust us to handle the whole process from start to finish. Our rapid turnaround time means that your exposure to harm is limited. In fact, requests are typically reviewed and initiated within 24 hours, depending on how many cases are currently in the pipeline and how urgently you need your request to be attended to.

Every takedown case is handled by our experienced teams of legal and technical specialists. More than 10 years of experience in brand protection, online enforcement, and content removal strategies makes them uniquely equipped to prevent harm to your brand. Furthermore, BrandShelter offers the benefit of global coverage – we can manage takedown requests across jurisdictions and platforms worldwide, navigating regional legal and technical requirements so that you don’t have to.

BrandShelter handles all requests for domain takedown services discreetly and confidentially, with strict controls to protect your sensitive information and privacy. You can be rest assured that your brand is protected against malicious actors, giving you the peace of mind you need to get on with doing what you do best – running your business.

Protect Your Brand from Damaging Domains

False domains can do untold damage to the brand you have worked so hard to grow. Building a base of loyal customers who trust you and your offering can be the work of years, and to have that destroyed by malicious actors in a matter of days can be devastating. The effect this can have on your revenue, trust, traffic to your site and your brand’s reputation is extensive, and wasting time and effort trying to get these websites shut down on your own will cost you even more in terms of legal fees and opportunity cost.

BrandShelter’s domain takedown services are fast, reducing the amount of time your brand is exposed to the risk of damage from fake websites. Not only are the sites taken down as quickly as possible: BrandShelter ensures that they don’t simply pop up again later, restarting the whole process. Our ongoing monitoring and enforcement can help address repeat infringements.

If you want to protect your brand from damaging domains, submit a takedown request today. BrandShelter allows you to protect your brand assets with comprehensive and powerful solutions tailored to your business needs.

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