Proxies for Brand Protection

Why use proxies for brand protection

The better known a brand is, the more people want to profit from it: sellers of counterfeits, lookalike sites, dishonest partners. Many of them show the violation not to everyone, but only to visitors from the country or city they target. From your office you simply will not see it.

A proxy from the right country solves this problem: you see storefronts, listings, ads and websites the way a local user sees them. Then you record the violation and file a complaint through the platform's official channels.

Counterfeits and unofficial sellers

Counterfeits most often turn up on marketplaces and classifieds sites. Search results there depend on the country and listings depend on the city, so each market has to be checked separately: Ukraine, Poland, Germany and other countries where you sell or where copies appear.

What people usually look for:

• products with your trademark priced well below the market;
• sellers who are not on your list of official distributors;
• listings with your photos and descriptions copied without permission;
• listings claiming a product is "in stock" when you do not sell it in that country.

The general principles of working with storefronts are described in the marketplaces use case, and the specifics of the Ukrainian classifieds site in the OLX use case.

Phishing sites and lookalikes

Scammers register domains similar to yours and copy your site's design to trick customers into paying or handing over their data. Some of these sites open only for visitors from a particular country and show everyone else a blank page or a placeholder.

Check suspicious addresses through a proxy from the country your customer complaints come from. Open them in a separate clean browser profile and do not enter anything into forms: no logins, no payment details.

Ads using your trademark

Another common violation is ads on searches for your name that lead to the site of a competitor, a reseller or a scammer. Ad impressions depend on the country and region, so you need to view them from an address in the right market. How such a check works is described in the ad verification use case.

Do not click other people's ads during a check: it is enough to look at the page and copy the link to see where it leads.

Checking partners and cloaking

If you run a partner program, it is important to know how partners use your brand. Sometimes a landing page looks neat for one country, while for another it promises discounts that do not exist or fakes your logo. Some use cloaking: the site shows different content to visitors from different regions, so that whoever checks it sees a "clean" version.

A proxy lets you see what a local user sees. Select a country in the generator, and if the partner targets a specific region or city, specify it in advanced mode. We explain what location selection is and how it works in the glossary: geo-targeting. Traffic with precise geo (region, city, ZIP or carrier (ASN)) is counted double, so start by checking at the country level.

How to collect evidence

A complaint to a platform is accepted faster when it comes with clear evidence. Save:

1. a screenshot of the whole page, including the address bar;
2. the date and time of the check;
3. the country and city you viewed it from, for example an IP check on the my IP page in the same profile;
4. links to the listings, classified ads or ads;
5. a saved copy of the page, if the platform removes it quickly.

A counterfeit or phishing page can only be removed through the platform's official processes: trademark infringement complaint forms, brand protection programs on marketplaces, requests to the domain registrar or hosting provider. Here a proxy helps you find and record the violation, and the platform makes the decision.

Which mode and proxy type to choose

For manual checks and capturing evidence, the "Sticky session" mode is convenient: ports 10000-20000 hold one address for 1 to 120 minutes, 30 by default. This way the whole check runs from one IP, and the screenshots match a single location.

For regularly going through search results for hundreds of queries, the "Rotating (new IP per request)" mode works well: port 823 (HTTP) or 824 (SOCKS5). A plan allows up to 1000 concurrent connections, but start with a small number of threads and keep your request rate moderate.

Many sites show datacenter addresses a simplified version or restrict them, so for brand protection people usually take residential proxies at $1.59 per GB, or mobile ones at $2.50 per GB if you need to see mobile results. Datacenter proxies at $0.80 per GB are fine for checking sites that do not distinguish between address types.

What to know in advance

• A proxy does not override platform rules: collect data and run checks within their terms.
• We do not promise that a site will accept a particular address: the site decides that itself.
• The pool is shared: another customer may have used an address before. The anonymity filter in the pool settings screens out IPs that sites have already flagged as proxies or VPNs.
• Banks and payment systems are closed to everyone through the proxy. See blocked sites.