Adrienne Urban’s home-based business, WholeNewMom.com, offers whole food recipes and tips for healthy non-toxic living. A longtime blogger, her success must have caught the attention of another business, because it stole one of her businesses’ most valuable assets: her name and identity.
A company selling CBD products online “lifted some of my personal information and photos from my blog and put it on their website,” she explains. Using her name, “they opened accounts on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud, and more, and even took out promotional articles in various outlets on the internet.” Due to hours of hard work and persistence, she has managed to get most of the fake social media accounts removed, except Twitter and SoundCloud.
The National Cybersecurity Society (NCSS) identified four main types of business identity theft in a 2018 report:
- Financial Fraud: obtaining new lines of credit, loans or credit cards; UCC fraudulent filings in the name of the business;
- Tax Fraud: filing fraudulent returns using tax subsidies or obtaining refunds from federal and state governments;
- Website Defacement: manipulating a business’s identity on the web; and
- Trademark Ransom: registering the business name as an official trademark and demanding a ransom for release of the trademarked business name.
Any of these types of fraud can be serious enough to cause a business to fail. How can you protect your business from identity theft? There’s no foolproof way to protect yourself but there are steps that may help:
1. Monitor Your Business Credit
Freelance writer Miranda Marquit found out she was the victim of business credit fraud when relatives alerted her they were getting calls from debt collectors about an “urgent business matter.” It turned out someone had opened a business credit card in the name of her business and the bills had gone unpaid for months. She was able to get it cleared up eventually, but it was a hassle. “One of my biggest mistakes was assuming that I didn’t need to worry about my business credit report,” she wrote in a blog post about her saga. “That mistake came back to haunt me in a major way.”
Monitor your business credit reports with commercial bureaus including Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax and Experian. New accounts or changes in your credit scores could indicate identity theft. (You can check and monitor business credit for free at Nav.com.)
2. Monitor Your Online Presence
As Urban learned, it’s all too easy for someone to steal your identity or online work. Here are a few ways to protect your online assets:
- Regularly search your name and your business name using incognito mode to see if someone is copying your information.
- Set up a google alert for your name and the name of your business.
- Do a “reverse image search” of your headshots and/or product photos to see where they appear online.
- Use a tool like Copyscape to check whether your website content has been stolen and used elsewhere.
- Trademark your business name to stop imitators and to make it easier to enforce theft of your name if it occurs.
And for social media accounts:
- Reserve social media handles using the name of your business whenever possible, and be sure to monitor them.
- Limit the use of third party apps that access social media accounts.
- Always use strong secure passwords unique to each social media site, then change them regularly.
3. Stay on Top of Taxes
In 2017 the IRS observed a 250% increase in the number of fraudulent returns to include filings for partnerships, estates and trusts. Due to coronavirus, the IRS has offered an automatic tax extension to July 15, 2020. While it is tempting to take advantage of an extension, you may inadvertently be giving a identity thief the opportunity to file a tax return in the name of your business—no doubt with the goal of obtaining a refund in your business name.
Filing your tax return early can help prevent fraud as any subsequent return filed in the name of your business is likely to be flagged. If your business moves, file a change of address form (IRS Form 8822-B) with the IRS so your information is up to date.
The Business Challenge No One Wants to Face
Urban is still dealing with the theft of her identity. She says,
“I spent literally hours and hours searching the web for infractions, sending emails and messages and even making phone calls and sending verification images to companies to prove that this was happening and requesting to have the fraudulent information removed. The stress resulting from this was substantial as well.
“Not only was this time-consuming, but it was for obvious reasons extremely troubling. [T]his company was taking orders for products on their website—could I have somehow been on the hook for any damages associated with their goods?”
“Who knows the ultimate effects in total?” she asks. “I do know that I don’t wish this on anyone.”
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