Brand Impersonation: The Hidden Costs to Your Reputation & Brand Value

Brand impersonation has emerged as one of the most serious cybersecurity threats facing brands in 2025, but the reason why may surprise you.

These frauds create far-reaching consequences, including irreparable damage to brand reputation and employee trust, along with other issues that are difficult to rectify. While damage control after a brand impersonation attack is costly, the resources required to mitigate the fallout are just a small part of the story.

The true value of a brand is more than its logo, visual identity, or intellectual property. It’s a relationship of trust, built over years or even decades, with consumers and employees.

And brand impersonation can destroy all that hard-won trust, in just a few clicks.

When brand reputation is tarnished, it can become very difficult to hire and retain talent, gain investors, partner with other businesses, and win consumer trust. Businesses must understand that brand impersonation phishing is on the rise. In 2024, 26% of phishing emails were sent by brands with whom the target had no established business relationship. Notably, 16% of these attacks saw a scammer pretending to be an employee at the same company as the target.

The good news is that there are steps brands can take to proactively safeguard their reputations and brand value from brand impersonation attacks.

What is Brand Impersonation?

Brand impersonation is a malicious practice where cybercriminals replicate the identity of a trusted brand to deceive individuals, steal sensitive information, or exploit consumer trust. These attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated as scammers leverage advanced technologies like Generative AI to create highly convincing fake websites, emails, and even social media profiles.

Traditionally, impersonation scams targeted individuals or government organizations, but there has been a significant shift toward exploiting established brands. By mimicking a company’s logo, tone, and digital assets, attackers aim to trick consumers into believing they are interacting with the legitimate entity, often leading to financial fraud, data breaches, or reputational damage.

For businesses, the fallout from a brand impersonation attack can be severe. Instead of focusing on growth and innovation, companies must divert resources to crisis management—investigating incidents, rebuilding consumer trust, and implementing additional security measures. These attacks can result in not only financial losses but also long-term damage to customer relationships and brand reputation.

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Types of Online Brand Impersonation Attacks

1. Phishing Emails

These emails appear to come from a recognizable brand, like a major retail chain or a financial institution, so customers are tricked into thinking they are from a trusted source.

Taking advantage of consumer trust, fraudsters try to obtain customer’s sensitive information, asking them for their credit card information or login credentials.

2. Executive Impersonation

With executive impersonation, a scammer might pretend to be the company CEO, CFO, or another high-level trusted executive. The attackers use social engineering to try and trick employees into transferring a large sum of money or  to disclose sensitive information. These messages target a specific person or group, such as a company’s Finance department.

Executive Impersonation can occur using different channels such as email, social media, and voice calls. Attacks have become so sophisticated that they can  now include leveraging AI tools that mimic people’s voices and speech patterns.

3. Domain Spoofing

In these frauds, cybercriminals create a fake website that mimics a website from a trusted brand. Typically, the domain name features a common misspelling of the legitimate URL, which may go unnoticed by consumers.

Believing they are on the real site of their bank or other brand, consumers may download malware or enter sensitive data.

Al has made this faster than ever to scale, with tools enabling site-building and content creation within minutes.

4. Fake advertisements 

Falsely presenting themselves as being a trusted brand, imposters often use fraudulent advertising to sell counterfeit products or lure customers into scams.

Bad actors are so skilled at this type of attack that they have even compromised Google Ads, bypassing the platform’s security checks.

5. Social Media Impersonation

For this type of impersonation, attackers create a fake social media account and pretend that it’s the official brand. Then, the attackers use their fraudulent accounts for malicious purposes like fake promotions, selling counterfeit products, or stealing customer information. 

The sale of counterfeit products is rife across social media platforms.

Brand Impersonation’s Lasting Damage

Stealing a brand’s identity has emerged as one of fraudsters’ favorite techniques, and for good reason – it’s a particularly effective style of attack.

With a plethora of digital channels providing a platform for scams, along with eCommerce opening up new opportunities for scammers, bad actors are embracing brand impersonation in a variety of ways.

In one scam, cybercriminals created malicious domains impersonating major retailers such as Target and GameStop, promising appealing “closing sale” discounts to unsuspecting customers.

These bad actors don’t just take advantage of users – they also seriously damage the reputations of the brands that they impersonate. They exploit customer trust and loyalty, damaging the brand’s credibility.

After a fraud, duped consumers often are left with negative feelings towards the real brand, even though the legitimate brand had nothing to do with the scam.

Trending: Cryptocurrency scams

Cybercriminals posing as well-known brands are also leveraging brand loyalty to entice customers into cryptocurrency scams.

A recent Ponzi scheme involved scammers impersonating Amazon and convincing users to invest in crypto. The victims, who believed they were part of a legitimate affiliate marketing program, were convinced that they needed to invest their own money in order to earn commissions.

Brand reputation is critical for employee and consumer trust

As public awareness around data security grows, 90% of consumers in the US and UK say they prefer to patronize a company that prioritizes safeguarding their data.

Customers may abandon brands whom they feel don’t do enough to protect their data online, in favor of those with a stronger approach to consumer data protection.

The fallout from brand impersonation can also negatively impact your company’s hiring prospects. There are an increasing number of employment scams tricking potential candidates into believing they are interacting with a legitimate company.

Half of all jobseekers say they would refuse to work for a disreputable company, demonstrating the importance of a good name when it comes to finding talent for your business.

Brand impersonations not only lead to lost sales – they can also mean the loss of valuable employees, due to reputational damage.

Protecting your brand reputation and fighting the threat of brand impersonation is essentially impossible to do manually, thanks to the sheer number of platforms and channels available to scammers.

Add to the mix the adoption of AI by cybercriminals to grow their scams to scale, and it’s clear that brands need comprehensive, automated solutions to help them discover and detect brand impersonation before it’s too late.

BrandShield: Protect Your IP and Brand Reputation

BrandShield’s automated digital risk protection platform takes the burden off your teams, empowering your company to focus on growth and innovation rather than fighting the ever-growing threat of online scams.

An online brand protection platform featuring advanced technology and the human expertise of IP experts, BrandShield safeguards your organization against a range of cybersecurity threats, including brand impersonation.

We take a proactive approach towards online brand protection by continuously monitoring digital channels, such as social media platforms, websites, marketplaces, and more.

Talk to BrandShield today to safeguard your brand’s reputation, value, and IP.