Imagine this- a consumer goes online with the intention of finding a real estate project where they can purchase a home. They start their search on a well-known search engine and come across results from some of the most reputed names in the real estate game in the country.
They click on one of the sponsored results, look through the website, and shortlist a project that aligns with their needs. This prospect then fills out a contact form which subsequently leads to a call with the builder’s sales team. The sales person informs the prospect that they will have to pay a small fee as an expression of interest in the project, to reserve their property. To incentivise the prospect, the sales rep even promises to offer them a competitive price that almost seems too good to be true.
Considering the opportunity cost of not acting immediately, the prospect makes the expression of interest payment. However, they never receive any confirmation from the builder’s side and are never able to reach the sales rep again.
This unsuspecting prospect has just fallen victim to a scam.
While this scenario may seem far-fetched to some, it is an unfortunately frequent occurrence in the realm of digital ads and real estate. While the plight of the victim of the scam, the consumer, is obviously evident, the builders whose names are used to execute such scams stand to lose a lot more. For the builders, such instances translate into lost revenue, legal issues, and broken customer trust.
To further cement the notion that this isn’t a made up scenario, here’s a case study about one of our clients that was facing a similar predicament, and was able to get out of it with the help of the mFilterIt solution.
Let’s find out more about this case:
The Challenge: Why Real Estate Brands Are at High Risk
Big real estate firms face an enormous yet hidden risk in the online realm. Scammers can employ a number of methods to dupe unwitting consumers while also tarnishing the name of the builder. Some of the most common ways scammers do this are:
· Fake Property Listings: This is perhaps the most common and the easiest way for scammers to steal money from potential customers of real estate firms. Scammers create fake property listings on popular listing websites and use them to lure potential buyers. From this point, depending on how much they are able to influence individual buyers, scammers take money from them in the form of visitation charges to booking amounts for reserving a property for purchase at a later date.
· Impersonation & Brand Misuse: This method is quite similar to the previous one, except with this, scammers are not limited to property listing websites. They may go one step further by creating fake social media profiles or even fake websites under the name of reputable real estate players. Using these, they can once again attract potential buyers and scam them.
· Intellectual Property Violations: Real estate businesses have to publish a variety of documents when advertising a project. Since most such documents, such as floor plans and certificates are available on public domain, they can be used by scammers to appear authentic in front of potential customers.
Besides causing distress to buyers and potential customers, such practices cause a lot of damage to authentic and well-meaning real estate players. Consumers that fall victim to these scams often form the impression that the actual real estate business has tried to outsmart them. While clarification on the subject can change this notion, providing such clarifications to tens of customers every day can prove impractical.
In fact, a similar reason is behind the widespread proliferation of such scams. Since it is impossible to manually track every instance of a brand’s name being used by a third party, especially in the case of big brand names, scammers take advantage of volume to outsmart vigilance.
The Solution: AI-Powered Brand Protection for Real Estate
While manual tracking cannot solve this problem, overcoming this issue is absolutely possible. With the right monitoring tool, such as the mFilterIt solution, real estate businesses can track and monitor instances of fraud and protect their prospects, customers, and most importantly, their brand image.
At mFilterIt, we used the following brand protection features to help our client overcome the dangers of online scams:
· Automated Digital Scanning: This feature is designed to detect fake listings, impersonations, and other forms of unauthorized brand usage. The AI-enabled feature does the tracking across platforms, including property listing websites, social media platforms, ad platforms, and even search engine result pages.
· ML-Based Categorization: In severe cases, automated digital scanning can uncover hundreds, even thousands of instances of brand impersonation. Dealing with so many cases one-by-one can take a long time. With Machine Learning (ML) based categorisation, mFilterIt helped by identifying and prioritizing high risk cases for quick takedowns and bulletproof protection.
· Confidence Scoring: Confidence Scoring is a feature that assigns a severity score to violations, based on the amount of risk they pose against the brand and its customers and prospects.
· Data-Driven Enforcement: All of the data points collected using the previously mentioned features are presented in an easily-digestible format on a central dashboard. This dashboard enables smart and quick decision making, enabling brand managers to monitor their brand protection in real time.
The Results: Real Impact
So what did we achieve by helping our client? How big was the problem? Did we manage to solve it? Here are the numbers:
· Our solution detected 1,177 cases of brand impersonation in the span of just six months.
· With this data, we took down 905 fake listings and fake social media accounts spread across five different platforms.
· New fake pages and listings that would popup on our radar were being removed in an average of 1-2 days.
· As a result of this exercise, the brand experienced an improvement in their brand reputation and enjoyed enhanced customer trust.
Evaluating a Brand Protection Solution for Real Estate
Real estate brands operating on the digital front must employ a reliable brand protection tool in order to protect their interests. This is important because modern day scammers have so many avenues to exploit that manually tracking everything is simply not possible. Besides being barely effective, manual tracking is also a cost-intensive undertaking. On the other hand, an automated AI-enabled solution can prove to be more effective and cost much less than a team of dedicated resources executing manual tracking.
Using an OSINT (open-source intelligence) powered solution, real estate brands can monitor for instances of impersonation across real estate platforms, social media platforms, digital advertising platforms, and website directories. Once a violation is detected, it must then be dealt with immediately, so as to minimize the impact that particular scammer can have on customers and their notion of the brand.
Way Forward: Secure Your Real Estate Brand Today
Real estate developers and brands must take the tracking of instances of brand impersonation in their own hands, and must take it seriously. While such activities don’t have a direct impact on the brand’s bottom line, they can cause significant damage to any brand’s image and authenticity in the long run. This long term effect can, over time, start becoming apparent in the brand’s balance sheets.
To enable brands with brand protection, the first step is to evaluate their current condition and their need for brand protection. To that end, mFilterIt is offering real estate brands a free brand audit and a free demo of our brand safety tool to demonstrate the seriousness of this threat, and our ability to protect brands against it.
Protect Your Brand from Digital Fraud – Get a Consultation Today.
