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Approaching Payment Processors To Fight Counterfeiters Online

By Joshua Kaufman
April 02, 2015

There are lots of knock-offs of entertainment industry goods that flood the marketplace. You can find them on the street, but more and more shoppers buy them online. And the online purveyors of counterfeit goods can be particularly difficult to thwart. Cease-and-desist letters are fine, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down letters are helpful, but if you really want to cause counterfeiters pain and stop them from infringing on intellectual property rights, you need to cut off their lifeline: cash flow.

Most counterfeiters who operate online hide their identities through a variety of privacy services, anonymous sites, false information in WHOIS, changed locations and different aliases. But what they cannot do is provide false information or out-of date-information to their banks, credit card companies or online payment services like PayPal. Failure to provide up-to-date and accurate bank and contact information to the payment providers will prevent the counterfeiters from getting paid and curtail their customers being able to use credit cards and PayPal on their websites, thereby cutting off their income stream.

In short, if they want to be paid, they have to be honest with their payment provider companies.

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