Every SME knows the effort and sustained commitment required to build a brand successfully. Most of that time goes into product quality, managing a team, delivering good customer service, and running marketing campaigns, to name only a few of the plates the average entrepreneur has to keep spinning.
It is understandable that, inevitably, some of these plates get dropped. Some may never have been spinning in the first place, and could already be causing damage to your brand you are not even aware of yet. Phishing and smishing deserve an entire book on the subject, but it takes only a few minutes to grasp the core concept and become a genuinely better defender of your brand.
Phishing and smishing, what is it?
These terms describe cyber-crime that targets victims through email, phone and text messaging. The typical setup involves a scammer pretending to be someone they are not, usually a well-known brand with an established trading and advertising history.
The scammer then encourages the victim to engage, usually by clicking a link embedded in their message. That link has nothing to do with the real brand, it directs the victim to a site designed to mimic the genuine one and capture personal information such as banking details.
As your brand grows in popularity, it becomes an increasingly lucrative target for criminals looking to borrow its trustworthy reputation for their scam.
How do you protect against it?
Ideally, a targeted individual is tech-savvy enough to spot most of these scams. The sophistication varies considerably, with many scams relying on sheer volume rather than believability, sending enough messages to snare a small percentage of victims.
You cannot rely exclusively on the scepticism of the people being targeted. A proactive defence matters, and it breaks down into a few key areas.
Prioritise the safety of your customers’ data
The most important step in protecting your brand is protecting your customers directly. Encrypting user data, applying regular software updates, minimising unnecessary data availability, and clearly differentiating between information that needs to be stored versus merely verified are all essential practices.
Even when your own systems are secure, that does not guarantee your customers’ information is safe everywhere. Often a victim’s personal contact information has leaked from an entirely different source, and it only takes one leak, from anywhere, to land someone on a scammer’s mailing list.
Notify customers if you catch wind of a scam
Even with strong internal practices, people, some of whom may never have dealt with your brand before, can start receiving suspicious messages claiming to be from you.
The most dangerous scenario is the overlap: people whose contact details have leaked and who have also, coincidentally, been a genuine customer of yours before. This group is the most vulnerable, since they are more likely to trust a message that appears to come from a brand they have actually bought from.
This is exactly why it matters to notify your customer base once you realise your brand is being used as the face of a scam. It is not a comfortable thing to do, it can alarm customers and feel like an admission of fault. First verify that no data leak occurred on your own servers, then explain the situation to customers clearly and simply.
Use your website, mailing list and social channels to raise awareness. Give customers a dedicated channel to report suspicious activity, a fraud-specific email address works well, and consider publishing real examples of what the scam messages look like to help customers recognise them. Sharing known scam numbers and URLs publicly makes it harder for criminals to keep operating, and keeping this information regularly updated shows you are staying on top of it.
Watch for misuse of your brand, permanently
This final step becomes part of your ongoing digital maintenance. Search tools let you filter results to only the most recently published pages mentioning your brand, making it straightforward to stay on top of new mentions across the web.
Apply the same vigilance to major social platforms, it is increasingly common for scammers to build fraudulent brand profiles on Facebook, Instagram and elsewhere. Getting a fraudulent profile removed can take considerable time once flagged, so acting early matters.
Accepting that this is now a permanent part of your digital maintenance can feel daunting, but it puts you in a considerably stronger position to respond quickly the moment something does go wrong.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between phishing and smishing?
Phishing typically refers to scam attempts via email, while smishing specifically targets victims through SMS or text messaging. Both rely on the same core tactic: impersonating a trusted brand to capture personal information.
What is the single most important step in protecting my brand from phishing?
Securing your customers’ data properly, encryption, regular updates, and minimising unnecessary data exposure, since a scammer impersonating your brand is far less dangerous if the underlying customer data was never exposed in the first place.
Should I notify customers if I discover my brand is being impersonated in a scam?
Yes. Verify first that no data leak occurred on your own systems, then communicate clearly through your website, mailing list and social channels, giving customers a dedicated way to report suspicious activity.
How can I monitor for ongoing misuse of my brand?
Set up recurring searches filtered to recently published content mentioning your brand, and monitor major social platforms for fraudulent profiles impersonating your business, treating this as permanent, ongoing maintenance rather than a one-time check.
Why do brands become bigger phishing targets as they grow?
A larger, more trusted brand gives a scammer more borrowed credibility to exploit, and a bigger existing customer base increases the odds that a random scam message lands on someone who has genuinely bought from that brand before.
Staying ahead of it
Phishing and smishing are not a one-time problem to solve and forget. Build customer data protection, scam monitoring and rapid customer communication into your regular business rhythm, and you will be considerably better positioned to protect your brand’s reputation when, not if, an attempt targets it.
Originally published in April 2022. Updated September 2026 to reflect current phishing and smishing protection practices. Scam tactics evolve constantly, so treat this as a starting framework rather than a fixed checklist.
