Social Media Alias’s
Creators need to be creative and come up with strategies to limit the creation & impact of catfish accounts. Content creators are on most social media platforms under our main brand names, however, catfish scammers as we know very well in this industry can be sneaky. At times, having social media accounts just under your regular brand name isn’t enough to protect you.
In our experience, we have learned to create social media accounts with slightly different spellings of our names. We have learned this tactic from catfish scammers themselves. They often use this tactic and hope that your supporters will accidentally misspell your name while searching for you and will find the scam account instead. We have had supporters who have been tricked this way into thinking they were having a personal one on one relationship with us, meanwhile it was a scammer profiting off our likeness.
Email Alias’s
We have had a scammer for years, who still profits off us to this day! They created an alternate email account that is spelled very similar to one of our real email addresses, and they use this to their advantage. We find that sometimes when supporters are trying to send us gift cards, they misspell our email, and the gift card goes directly to the scammer’s inbox. The scammer is very quick to claim the gift cards as well, it’s almost instant! We have lost so many Amazon gift cards to them over the years. So much so that we created a new email address that is completely different from that one and have stopped using and promoting the other one.
How To Protect Your Brands
Whenever a catfish account pops up under one of our multi-aliases, we do reach out to our supporters for help. Mass reporting these accounts can sometimes get them taken down or flagged as a fake account. But that’s not always the case.
You can also help to protect your brand by having a collective link service such as Linktree or Allmylinks, so all your legitimate social accounts can be listed in one area. You can then make a note in the bio of your social accounts, that these are the only links that are yours. This will help supporters know which accounts to follow and which to avoid. Creating your own website to have as a landing page for all your legitimate links is a great idea too. Your own website is a great place to encourage supporters to sign up for your email list. That way no matter what happens, even if your social media accounts are taken down you will still have a way to contact all your supporters and direct them to your new socials before they can be tricked by a catfish.
Another way we have protected our content is through watermarking. We watermark all our content and place them strategically within the content. We have found that if you place a small watermark on the corner of your content, scammers will be able to blur out your watermark or crop it out completely. There are ways to hinder them from doing this. On photo content we place at least one watermark (sometimes more) directly on the photo in a place which does not have a solid colour background (which can easily be removed). We try to place watermarks within the image in places that would be more difficult or inconvenient to remove. For video content, we place our watermark on the video so it covers some portions of the video, but does not hinder the experience for the viewer. We decrease the opacity of our watermark, so it is still visible but does not block any of the action. Sometimes we also include links that appear sporadically within the video. That way if our content is pirated, it is easier to have it removed. Also, with watermarks people who find us through pirated content can find us and support us on our legitimate platforms.
Protecting your brand is extremely important. It can be difficult when you have more than one version of a brand name, but not impossible. There are many ways to proactively protect your content, you just need to figure out which is the best strategy for you!
