‍Fighting the Fakers: OSINT on the Cyber-Fraud Frontline ‍

We put our trust in strangers when we buy something online. 

We trust that we won’t be harming brands we love with fake designer gear. We trust that ‘high-end’ vodka won’t contain toxic antifreeze, nail polish remover, methanol or isopropanol. We trust that we won’t be sold ‘luxury’ fragrances that burn our skin with caustic ingredients, or medicines that poison. We trust that our kids’ new toys won’t cut with sharp edges, choke with loose parts, or pack dangerous combustible circuits.

Anything can be faked. The task of a brand protection investigator is to stop the fakers.

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OSINT will be part of the future of brand protection. It’s already part of the present. 

Every day brings an influx of new data on new platforms, particularly social media. As the Internet gets ‘bigger’, IP (Intellectual Property) and brand protection investigators’ work gets tougher. 

The rise of eCommerce facilitates the sale of far larger volumes of counterfeit goods than ever before: from sneakers to life-saving medicines. In 2023, Amazon detected over 700,000 bad-actor attempts at fraudulent selling, disposing of 7 million counterfeit products. And of all border seizures of counterfeit goods, 34% now have the potential to harm.

For sellers, closed groups, encrypted services and private communications make it easier than ever for cyberfraudsters to hide their identities, let alone conceal illegal sales or illegitimate claims. New technologies like AI and deepfakes may even introduce new kinds of brand abuse to combat.

With the overwhelming scale of modern digital marketplaces, investigators find their time is stretched to the limit. Investigators need to amplify their manpower; they need a force multiplier to help protect brands - and consumers - by unmasking these bad actors.

This is where OSINT Industries comes in. 

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Meet Chris*.

Chris*, an OSINT Industries user, works with an organization doing research and analysis for brand protection. 

Chris’s organization is on the frontline combating the proliferation of fraudulent and counterfeit goods sold online. Brands and partners turn to his team when their IP is under threat, or the potential for cyber-enabled harm to consumers arises.

Three cases came to Chris’s mind when we asked how OSINT Industries has helped facilitate success in his brand protection missions. 

Anonymised to protect Chris’s team, these three mission victories are glimpses into how the OSINT Industries platform integrates into the sensitive, indispensable day-to-day work of a brand protection investigator.

Together, these victories demonstrate how brand protection work is as vital to consumers as it is to brands - with OSINT as an investigator’s secret weapon.

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1: Taking Advantage

They’ll purchase something from your online store, and send the product to a drop site. As soon as it’s ‘arrived’, the product - according to them - has a problem. They’ll demand a refund, using a Fake Tracking ID (FTID) to make their claim seem legit. They might even use a signature technique: ‘double-dipping’, ‘Did Not Arrive’ (DNA) or substituting your returned product for an actual block of dry ice.

The point? To get your product, and a refund on top.

Customer-friendly return and refund policies make eCommerce better for consumers - most of the time. A growing trend in retail fraud sees bad actors taking advantage of sellers’ kindness. 

Reports of ‘Shipping and Refund’ scamming have shot up by 43% year on year, becoming a pain point for 39% of online stores.  As more people scam, return and refund policies get harsher, and hostility and distrust towards customers in the online space grows.

To make things worse, identifying these scammers is tough. They’ll often use PayPal to hide their real identities, or simply make the refund process more complicated to dispute.  

With OSINT Industries, Chris is able to expose them.

Chris’s team had an assignment related to a Shipping and Refund scam - including a subject’s email address. Normally, this wouldn’t automatically generate a lead; with OSINT Industries, this is all an investigator needs to get started. 

Searching this email address on our platform immediately brought up a social media profile. Not only did this profile suggest the scammer’s identity, but it also revealed the extent of the scammer’s activity: it advertised a refund scam tutorial.

This is fraud-as-a-service (FaaS): using a social media profile or forum post, fraudsters or even fraud rings will advertise their scam skills for hire - or worse, like this suspect, instruct others on how to easily become cybercriminals themselves. 

With this social account linked to an email address and suspected fraudulent activity, the trail became clearer. OSINT Industries' email results lead to an identity, a location, and following the ‘footprints’, an individual.

Chris could do this in a fraction of the time it would take to uncover the culprit manually. 

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2: Fake Sneakers

Your favorite designer drops a new bag. At designer price, it’s unattainable - or maybe it sells out too fast. Then almost immediately, a designer bag appears on Facebook Marketplace, Instagram Shop or even TikTok. This bag looks legit: it’s labelled, made of high quality materials, with signature touches and that unmistakable style. The price might even approximate the real thing. 

The difference between this bag and the legitimate item? This fake was made by a virtually unpaid worker in a deadly sweatshop, held in modern slavery by a criminal gang. 

This fake supports a cycle of poverty and injustice. What’s more, it's worthless

In one scenario customers purchase a luxury fake by accident, duped into buying a harmful counterfeit. Others, let's admit it, intentionally buy a fake. 

If the problematic provenance of these obvious counterfeits wasn’t bad enough, that new designer bag could cause harm to unscrupulous customers too. A low-quality fake might fall apart alarmingly fast - or, absent any quality control, go on sale with toxic or dangerous components: lead-based coatings, irritating adhesives or flammable oils.

Fakes may be cheap, but the real cost to consumers is high; not to mention the devastating effect on brands’ trustworthiness and prestige. A brand can take a century to cultivate an image that’s now adored worldwide.

Chris and his team got a lead on a luxury goods counterfeiter. 

If something looks too good to be true in luxury goods sales, it probably is. When Chris’s team saw extremely rare collab sneakers up for sale, they immediately smelled a counterfeit operation.

Listed on the suspect’s advertisement were a couple of email addresses. Chris immediately began to investigate with OSINT Industries. He conducted an email search - and struck gold. 

One of the emails produced results for an eCommerce profile, advertising unfeasibly rare collab sneakers for sale - and exposing the scammer’s potential identity.

While fake sneakers may seem a shallow concern, the reality is much deeper. Not only do counterfeiters produce their goods in unsafe and exploitative environments, but buying fake sneakers could also be funding the worst kinds of crime, on a global scale. 

‘Counterfeiting is… is one of the most lucrative criminal activities for terrorist organisations. Narcotics trafficking yields a 200% profit but counterfeiting… generates a net return of 2,000%. Why get involved in risky drug trafficking when you can make ten times as much from counterfeit goods?’ - Bernard Brochand, French parliamentarian [Source]

The French Directorate of Territorial Surveillance observed that Afghan terrorist networks exist ‘thanks to’ three crimes: ‘robberies, credit card copying… and the counterfeiting of designer clothes’. Counterfeiting, as the largest but least traceable criminal industry in the world, is an ideal source of funding for not only Mafia groups like the Camorra, but terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda, the INLA and Boko Haram. 

French authorities found that the ‘Charlie Hebdo terrorists’, the Kouachi brothers, funded their attack in part from dealing in counterfeit sneakers. There’s a reason why buyers of counterfeit goods are now considered accomplices to crime under French and Italian law.

Combating luxury goods fraud with OSINT Industries can help to cripple terrorist action, demonstrate the wider worth of brand protection, and explode the cliche that counterfeiting is a victimless crime..

‘Consumers believe that the buying and selling of fakes is not that big a deal. This is just not true. What the tourist on holiday does not see about those handbags is that they may well have been stitched together by a child that was trafficked away from her family… The car repair shop owner doesn’t realise… those fake brake pads [are] lining the pockets of an organised crime gang involved in drugs and prostitution.’ - Alastair Grey, Counterfeit Investigator [Source]

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3: Bad Bags

At the core of a car’s frontal airbag is an inflator. In a crash scenario, this metal cartridge loaded with propellant chemical wafers is triggered to ignite, filling the airbag in less than 1/20th of a second.

If this wafer is made with the wrong chemical, like ammonium nitrate, the bag won’t inflate. It’ll touch off with explosive force. The inflator’s ruptured housing will spray sharp metal shrapnel throughout the passenger cabin, lacerating anything in its path.

Throughout the Takata recall scandal, more than twenty-seven Americans were killed by defective airbags. Over four-hundred people were left with life-changing injuries, disabilities and disfigurements - all because of a single manufacturing oversight.

These were legitimate airbags. This July, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has issued an urgent warning about another scandal on the rise: substandard counterfeit inflators installed as replacements.

The NHTSA reports three lost lives and at least three ‘life-altering’, disfiguring injuries as a result of counterfeit replacement airbags in the last 9 months. As every deployed airbag has to be replaced, it’s estimated these ‘bad bags’ could be installed in two-million vehicles countrywide. Manufactured by unknown companies outside the U.S., they’re ordered online and installed by reputable repair shops duped by prices well below the market average.

‘The bogus airbag… sent sizable metal fragments into drivers’ chests, necks, eyes and faces, which resulted in serious injuries or deaths in what would have otherwise been survivable collisions.’ [Source: Forbes]

Here, brand protection professionals like Chris have the task of preventing not only consumer contributions to harmful practices, but fraud likely to result in consumer injuries and even deaths. 

All Chris had was a lead on four suspected ‘bad bag’ sellers. With the bags sold online, this was a cyber-enabled crime - and a task for OSINT Industries. 

One of the targets had already been researched by the team’s analysts in two prior reports, to no avail. The investigation had been at a dead end; until Chris ran a phone number search on our OSINT platform.

The investigation sparked into life. Searching this first target’s phone number on OSINT Industries yielded a number of accounts the team hadn’t previously found. On these accounts, the first target not only revealed a possible  identity, but further account names, common usernames, locations - and even a photo of the target.

The second of the ‘bad bag’ sellers had an email address. An OSINT Industries email search brought up three accounts located in the same geographic area, and an account for another, unrelated individual. This confirmed the public record email address was a false positive. 

‘Sometimes finding out there isn’t a connection is just as important.’ - Chris*

For the third ‘bad bag’ seller, Chris’s team has a phone number. This revealed multiple social media profiles - all with partial email addresses. From here, OSINT Industries’ platform reported an account with the suspect’s potential government name, and a photo of an automobile.

On one of their profiles, the third ‘bad bag’ fraudster had uploaded the same car photo that appeared on their counterfeit airbag listing. The image even showed a full, unredacted license plate number. Attribution, confirmed.

Chris’s team had tracked down, with the OSINT Industries tool, a fatally dangerous type of scammer. ‘Bad bags’ are not the only place Chris’s team could continue to make a life-saving difference for consumers with OSINT Industries, and deliver justice to cybercriminals.

Sales of counterfeit medicines are at an all-time high; whether endangering those who need them, like ineffective fake Insulin, or harming those who take them for cosmetic uses, like fake Ozempic and Botox. These drugs are often sold online, via online pharmacies outside the US - just like ‘bad bags’. 

In future, OSINT could be at the frontline of this battle too. 

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4: OSINT Industries, the ‘Timesaver’

‘It’s a great assist to allow an investigator to optimize their time, by minimizing manual work.’ - Chris

The OSINT Industries platform has become a key part of these brand protection investigators’ day-to-day lives.

Chris’s team came to OSINT Industries when their existing tool delivered too many false positives - something we’re proud we don’t do. Seeking alternatives, the team discovered OSINT Industries, and seized the opportunity.

Immediately, the team found our tool ‘very helpful’, using our phone number search to bypass fraudsters’ common use of dummy email addresses. OSINT Industries has become the daily force multiplier that helps these investigators to find suspect accounts that couldn’t be found using any other method or platform. 

Yet even more importantly, OSINT Industries saved Chris’s team time.

Brand protection research is highly time-sensitive. When you’ve got the entire eCommerce space to trawl, you need ‘headstarts to maximize your time’ - and the headstart from our platform has been game-changing. 

A lead that before was a ‘maybe’ is now a sure start. Where their previous OSINT platform delivered false positives, OSINT Industries helps Chris to discount wrong paths and false profiles before they can waste his team’s time and energy.

Chris sees OSINT Industries as ‘adding to your spiderweb of data… a convenience and a timesaver’. With more time and more intel, Chris’s team are more powerful in their fight against fakes and fakers. 

Since discovering OSINT Industries, Chris has begun to recommend our platform to his partners and clients. Thanks to his recommendation, other entities working on cyber-enabled harm prevention ‘vouch for’ OSINT Industries too, including those fighting human trafficking in classified ads.

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Chris knows eCommerce is here to stay. We’ll all keep putting our trust in strangers online.

What his team does enables us as consumers - and as sellers - to do so more safely. 

Chris and his team are keen to refute the cliché that counterfeiting, fraud and brand abuse are victimless crimes.

‘We all have friends and family members that don’t understand the risks of buying goods online… Even if you can’t raise awareness, you can mitigate the risk to people who aren’t aware.’ - Chris*

Child labour and carcinogenics are rarely associated with buying fakes online. Many people don’t imagine that fake sneakers could fund terrorism, or a cheaper replacement airbag could kill in a crash. 

We all know cyberfraud, and cybercrime in general, inflict massive financial losses on brands and businesses every year - not to mention reputational damage too. What most don’t see is the human cost of even this seemingly abstract type of harm. Small businesses find it difficult to get started, and employees lose their jobs  when the funds aren’t there.

‘Counterfeit goods cost clothing, cosmetics and toy industries… nearly 200,000 jobs per year in Europe.’ [Source: EUIPO]

Chris hopes that even if his work, aided by OSINT Industries, is unable to raise awareness for consumers, stopping the fakers at the source with OSINT can protect unknowing but at-risk consumers - older people, minors, Internet novices or fledgling online businesses - from falling prey to cybercrime.

We must never forget, Chris says, that ‘cybercrime affects a real person’.

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*Names have been changed to protect identities.