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How to Protect Your Consumers from Fraud? – Step-by-Step Guide

Doing business in today’s world is more than just selling and making a profit. It is now more about building a last-longing relationship with consumers. This is because more and more customers are now choosing to deal with only brands that they trust. This means that trust is starting to precede sales, and brands that do not build trust always tend to fade out quickly.

But building trust takes work, and one of the most effective ways to win consumer trust is to demonstrate clearly that you are protecting them as well as their well-being.

One of the things to protect your consumers from (and which they often fall victims to) is frauds such as counterfeits and fake products. These frauds can cost your customers anything from a large amount of money to a threat to their health or personal space.

We will now consider what these consumer frauds are, why it is important to protect your buyers and measures you can use to enforce this important protection.

Importance of Protecting Your Consumers from Fraud

Consumer fraud is an instance that can result in any form of loss for a buyer in any part of the market. Consumer frauds have existed for some time now but have begun to increase every year, owing to the development of new technologies and the widespread of the internet.

Last year alone, over 2.2 million fraud reports were received by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from American consumers, with buyers losing over $3.3 billion. This is a common trend worldwide, and sadly, it seems these numbers will increase when the reports for 2021 come in.

Consumer protections are necessary measures that businesses take to protect their customers and prevent any fraud from befalling them. This is important for several reasons, including the following:

To Build Brand Trust

As we have earlier emphasized, nobody buys from a brand they cannot trust any longer. Businesses that have won people’s trust usually enjoy more sales than those that overlook this aspect. Protecting your customers is still one of the most effective ways to build this necessary trust.

To Gain a Competitive Edge

Having a competitive edge is essential to help you play in the global market. Since protecting your buyers means they will gravitate towards you more than other businesses, this will naturally put you in the lead and ahead of your competition.

To Protect Your Brand Reputation

Some measures that protect your consumers – such as preventing piracy, copyright and patent protection, and stopping counterfeits – do not only work to benefit your consumers but also benefit your company as well. They ensure that your brand’s reputation is always intact, which can translate to more sales and increased revenue.

Types of Risks Your Consumers May Be Exposed To

There are several risks that buyers get exposed to daily, and ignoring can often lead to terrible consequences and below are some of the most common consumer risks on the market today:

Financial Risks

Most times, when fraud occurs, buyers end up losing their hard-earned money. This could occur when they buy fake products or when they lose their personal information to cybercriminals. Such personal information like bank details and social security numbers can be used to gain access to a consumer’s account before large sums of money can be withdrawn out of such accounts.

Health Risks

Another major risk that customers are likely to encounter while unprotected is a risk to their health. When consumers purchase and consume fake products, the result is usually a threat to their health. This is most common with food and other consumable products, and the threats could range from common nausea to stroke and, in some severe cases, death.

The danger of this risk is not limited to one consumer alone; it could affect hundreds or even thousands of buyers who consume the same product.

Reputational Risks

This risk can be sublime or devastating depending on the social class of the affected consumers. For some buyers, purchasing a fake product such as clothes and other accessories can significantly threaten their careers and societal class.

On the flip side, this risk may also affect you as a brand and your reputation in the market, causing you to lose customers and make very little revenue.

Measures That You Can Undertake to Prevent Fraud

Showing concern about your customers tends to bring numerous benefits, and some have been highlighted above, and the under-listed measures are some of the ways that you can take prevent fake manufacture and distribution of harmful products and services:

Registering your brand digital assets and enforcing their protection
Setting up geo-restrictions to prevent your goods and services from reaching certain quarters
Performing large-scale web scraping to monitor counterfeits and setting up anti-counterfeiting measures. For example, you can use SERPMaster – a search engine scraping tool – to gather information from Google Shopping. To learn more about the tool, please visit our website.
Intensifying data security on your website or payment pages
Hiring professional services to ensure consumer protection across the internet

Conclusion

Internet frauds are on the increase, and, sadly, they can happen to anybody. They make consumers belled in more ways than one and cost the economy billions of dollars each year. It is therefore imperative that brands take up initiatives and measures that will protect their buyers from these frauds both to benefit themselves and their customers as well.

Mubi