How many times have you received an email from Amazon about your order, and when you hover over the link, you see that it really goes to something like amazon.anofficialsoundingname.com? This is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but if one of your customers falls for it, they will likely blame you. You need to monitor the use of your brand and company names to make sure nobody is trying to scam your customers.
There are two basic patterns that you should monitor with Google Alerts to be warned when anyone creates this type of fake URL based on your company. They both use the site: operator. If you aren’t familiar with this command, you can check out my tutorial page on its use.
The first pattern is site:yourcompany.*. This will find your company name used in a URL from another country. For example:
site:citibank.*
The other pattern is site:yourcompany.*.*, which matches your company name as a subdomain to someone else’s URL. Try this:
site:citibank.*.*
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