EP 335. Winner Winner Chicken Dinner! Nope!

 

Texas Waterfowl Hunting At It’s Finest

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Duck Season Somewhere, where today, we’re not going to talk about ducks, but I think you all are going to find today very interesting and it starts like this. getducks.com is 20 years in the business and to celebrate, I decided, I was going to give away an all expense paid Argentina duck hunt. By the time this podcast airs, you still got time to register. Hey, if somebody’s got to win, it might as well be you. What could go wrong? I was at Dallas Safari Club. I filmed it, Boom. I released it that afternoon. It’s going to run for 6 weeks till SEI. And within 24 hours, not only was the response on social media blowing up, there was another blow-up happening. I started getting texts. I started getting inboxes. I started getting phone calls, a week later, say, I won. What do you mean? Well, what happened is, all of a sudden, somebody, person or persons unknown, started, I don’t know, copying my webpage, copying my profile, and contacting people that follow saying, you won a prize. Click this link. Anybody knows me knows, if you win a prize, I’m going to call you. Hey, we’re going to Argentina. I’m not going to send you a link. I’m not going to ask for personal information. Thank many of you all listening for shooting me an inbox and letting me know that there was a fraudulent account, accounts plural, it turns out we’re still fighting it. Thank you all for bringing it to my attention because first thing they would do is block me, so I couldn’t see it and then start running their gamut. And thanks also to today’s guest, Caleb McClain, who is a brand protection team leader out in San Antonio Texas, who basically helps manage intellectual property for his clients in the outdoor space. A lot of you guys listening, this story ain’t about me getting hijacked. It could affect any of you all. My old buddy from Michigan’s like, man, I wish I was famous enough somebody ripped me off. You ain’t got to be nobody. If they can find a toe-in, they’re going to rip off your social media or your webpage or your business or your product or something you or somebody you know does. Turns out it’s a massive industry that once Caleb and I got into it, I found myself in a real interesting rabbit hole about this whole modern digital era that we live in today. Caleb, how the hell are you, man?

Caleb McClain: I’m doing great, Ramsey, how are you?

Ramsey Russell: I’m doing fine. I’m doing a lot better now that you have taken the helm to fight this. What the heck are these people doing? That’s what I couldn’t understand. What are they doing?

Caleb McClain: Yeah. Just like everyone else in the world, they’re out here to make a buck. And when it comes down to it, some people choose to make their money in unsavory methods.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it blows my mind how the first one, what do you call this scam account, fraud account?

Caleb McClain: Yeah. I would just refer to it as a fraudulent Instagram account.

Ramsey Russell: The first fraudulent Instagram account to prop up was @ramseyrussellgetducksUS. I remember one that was @ramseyrussell, something else. And as we caught on to them and started fighting them via Instagram and WordPress or whatever else, they became real clever. It’s my picture, my image, everything verbatim to my page. It’s even got a bunch of followers. Not as many as we got, but a bunch, kind of sort of looks legit. And they started misspelling. If you weren’t paying attention, it’d be Ramsey Russell with 3 S’s or 2 R’s that you just read right over. And it’s kind of disturbing when you’re right in the middle of a very exciting promotion. And, golly man, I can’t wait to call that guy or girl and say, you just won a free, all-expense paid trip to Argentina. I can’t wait. You know what I’m saying? But all of a sudden, I got people call me saying, well, I got a notification that I won and I clicked a link, but anyway, I don’t know what I did or where it took me, but I’m calling you. Well, now you didn’t win. It said right there in official room, I’ll be announced it on the 24th. It’s crazy how these people, you know what’s crazy, Caleb, is how quickly they became aware of this and the potential to scam or whatever they’re doing with this, to seize it. I mean, 24 hours, 30 hours maybe. I think within 48 hours, you had in-boxed me and as a follower and said, hey, you got this issue and here’s what’s going on. And I was very thankful. And I’m very thankful, Caleb, you’ve helped me figure this stuff out.

Caleb McClain: Absolutely, it was no worry at all.

Ramsey Russell: Tell the listeners who you are and what you do and who you work for.

Caleb McClain: Yes, absolutely. So, as you said, my name is Caleb McClain. I’m located down here in San Antonio, Texas. I’m a brand protection team lead at Corsearch, where we basically help protect our clients intellectual property on the Internet, amongst many other things that we do here.

Ramsey Russell: That’s kind of a big deal nowadays, isn’t it? You are a duck hunter?

Caleb McClain: Yeah, I was going to say I’m an avid duck hunter, outdoorsman, father.
Ramsey Russell: Is there a lot of duck hunting opportunity there in San Antonio?

Caleb McClain: In San Antonio, not so much. We drive a lot.

Ramsey Russell: Up to the panhandle.

Caleb McClain: I like to hit the coast a lot. I’ll actually be heading down to the coast this weekend to help close out the season a little bit.

Ramsey Russell: How did you end up as a duck hunter? How did you end up in your field of employment? I can see where it’d be a very good field to get into if you want to stay meaningfully employed. I mean, there’s got to be a lot of need for what you’re doing.

Caleb McClain: There is no shortage of it, yeah. So, I was actually as a duck hunter, I went to Ole Miss and enjoyed the duck hunting that was everywhere out there. Ended up after graduation, moving to Dallas to pursue a career in sales. Didn’t really care too much for the sales and marketing side of life. Switched it up a little bit, wanted to get something closer to what I went to school for, which was economics. So, I started looking for analyst positions and one day I applied for a job that was a brand protection analyst. And it just happened to be a job that suited me well and I was promoted a few times in the company, and here I am.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. You said something to me the other day. You were saying that, you handle a lot of the accounts in the outdoor industry.

Protecting Yourself from Online Scams

Caleb McClain: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: Because in this field, it’s not just the hunting and fishing that gets affected. It’s all industries. But you’re the guy on staff that knows how to tear down a shotgun and clean it, hunt and fishing, put on waders and all that good stuff. So it really kind of worked out good, didn’t it?

Caleb McClain: Yes, sir, it did. It was kind of the perfect position, especially as we started gaining a lot of clients in this industry. I think our world has really been hit hard and there’s a lot of people spending a lot of good money and they need quality products, and they need not to be scammed.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well, there’s a lot of scam out there and I guess the Internet and social media has just made it ripe. It just blows my mind, Caleb that again, within 24 hours, somebody sitting in this world, in some third world country saw this and booyah was already spawning.

Caleb McClain: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: And it was real enough, incredible enough, even though it’s kind of, I don’t click nothing, that don’t come from you or somebody. I don’t click nothing. I might even call somebody, I don’t really know and say, did you send me something I need to click? I don’t click nothing. It looked real enough to start pulling people in.

Caleb McClain: Well, Ramsey, I know that you were blocked from the pages, but even one of the pages had your little link tree on it that goes back to getducks.com. So it even looked more legitimate, where it had all your links to your podcast and everything that you had. And then, oh, yeah, by the way, they were also just messaging your followers, saying that they won the grand prize.

Ramsey Russell: Where do we start with a – I learned a lot through the appeals process. First and foremost, as you and I began to talk, I learned where to go to Instagram. I had given it my best 15, 20, 30 minutes, clicking around in my menu on my iPhone, trying to find how to contact somebody. There ain’t an 800 number, I can tell you. And there’s not an email address.

Caleb McClain: No.

Strategies for Safeguarding Brand Identity

We learned – anybody listening – I don’t care if you just invented a hap company and you ain’t sold your first dozen yet, you better protect your brand, you better protect the name. 

Ramsey Russell: And you sent me a link to a form and then gave me some guidance on keywords and specific topic. I can’t just say somebody’s scamming me. I got to be very specific about rights that they are beginning to infringe on. What’s the best place to start? Some terminology or some concepts here.

Caleb McClain: I think that’s the best way to start because, I’m sure we’ll be throwing around a couple of these words and I’m not going to get too technical into it, but the first word and the reason why we were able to attack it successfully starting out was copyright and that’s because they were using your images. A copyright is just simply the protection that you have on any artwork that’s owned by you. That can be pictures, videos, songs, whatever it may be. It’s a little bit different from a trademark, though, where a trademark would be like a name, a logo, a design, feature that you have actually registered with a federal entity.

Ramsey Russell: Hang on a second. On both those points right there copyright. On our social media webpage, we state these images are copyrighted.

Caleb McClain: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: You don’t have to. You take the picture, it’s yours. You’ve got an implied copyright on trademark. We learned the hard way through some duplicity in the industry. We learned – anybody listening – I don’t care if you just invented a hap company and you ain’t sold your first dozen yet, you better protect your brand, you better protect the name. And so we actually went through the process to register as a trademark getducks.com. It’s Duck Season Somewhere, the logo, because if you don’t have it and somebody else lays claim to it, good luck. It could be a long time before you get it back. Even though you used it first and can demonstrate, it’s still going to be a long tenuous process, if somebody goes to register it. So, anybody listening has got anything. It’s something really, it’s one of them kind of things you ought to take a look at. So anyway, you were saying copyright, trademark?

Caleb McClain: Yeah. I mean, there’s patents too, but I wouldn’t get too deep into that. That requires court cases and everything. And then where we enforce these is we enforce these on 3 separate channels, generally. So those channels would be online marketplaces, which is just a website where anybody can go sell.

Ramsey Russell: Amazon, eBay.

Caleb McClain: Amazon, exactly. Social media, which is where your issues began. So that’s just where anybody can go post content, thoughts, etc. That’s your Facebooks, your Instagram, your Twitters and then standalone websites. And you could throw in their domains, which would just be a freestanding site where the owner of the site owns all content and the domain would be whatever you type into the little search bar and you finish it with .com or .org whatever. So, the perfect example would be getducks.com. You made the website, you own it, you own all the content on it.

Ramsey Russell: It’s interesting. I did a little research one day. Web domain, there could be somebody that wants to use that name for good or bad purposes.

Caleb McClain: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: And whereas in a lot of legal cases, lawsuits, you have to prove damages. Okay, this guy stole my name and it’s costing me this much. Well, that’s kind of hard to do. In the instance of cybersquatting. You don’t have to prove nothing. There’s a freaking $100,000. All you got to do is prove that they’re squatting on your trademark, on your domain and there’s like $100,000 starting point. It’s a really big deal that when the Internet was being born back in old cowboy days, there’s a lot of folks jumping out and buying great big brand names and trying to do stuff with it. And that got settled pretty quick. You probably don’t want to fool with CocaCola.com.

Caleb McClain: No, they’ll take care of that real quick. If they want to get a domain. There are court processes, the most common ones, just like a UDRP, which is just simply a court order to transfer the domain name and it requires a little bit of money exchanging, but nothing that’s absolutely insane as compared to back in those days when, exactly what you’re talking about every big box store was having their name or their domain bought out early.

Ramsey Russell: And then had to go buy it. There were a lot of businesses that went and bought 5000, 10,000, 20,000 domains knowing that eventually somebody was going to want that domain because that was their company and so they had to buy it from the owner. But that’s different than, I’ve got a domain and somebody else is just going to come up with something disparaging or something. It’s different. I can’t squat on your domain.

Caleb McClain: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: Especially if it’s trademarked. Tell me, you deal a lot with the outdoor industry. Our listeners are primarily hunters, fishermen, outdoor industry people. What are some of the common infringements that you deal with there at concerts? What do you do and what are some of the common things you have to deal with?

Most Common Online Scams

Everyone is being targeted. There is no single product that is safe. We see them all through the outdoor industry. 

Caleb McClain: Yeah, so I would say the biggest one is definitely counterfeiting. Just a counterfeit, simply any item, where the product or the product packaging bears a brand’s trademark. So we find those on all of those channels that we just discussed. We find those on marketplaces, we find those being advertised on social media, we find those on independent websites. And I know that back in the day, I think everybody really used to think of counterfeits and some people still do, is knockoff designer label handbag or a knockoff high-end jacket.

Ramsey Russell: A Rolex watch in the third world country market for $6.

Caleb McClain: Yeah, that’s not how it is anymore. Everyone is being targeted. There is no single product that is safe. We see them all through the outdoor industry. It doesn’t matter what knives, optics. I’ve seen ammunition, high-end camo brands, Western big game backpacks, fishing equipment, even duck decoys.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard of some duck decoy stuff and some of the stories I’ve heard around counterfeiting, if I’m following what you’re saying is it makes me think of somebody I knew way back when had come up with a product, an outdoor patio product, sent it to China and it got stalled and kicked around, done some stuff. Next thing he knows, some plant in China comes out with a knockoff and it won a dang thing. They’re not subject to US infringement or whatever laws.

Caleb McClain: They have their own laws and they’re a little bit different than ours. Yes, sir. And I’ll tell you another thing that we’re even seeing now is with the rise of 3D printing and how easy that is, we’re seeing firearms and firearms parts being counterfeited.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Caleb McClain: Oh, yes sir. It’s a real problem. And people are having to start to look to how to curb it.
Ramsey Russell: If it were a Brand X gun part, is part of the counterfeiting calling it Brand X gun part, like when you’re on Amazon or eBay, it could be Brand X changed just enough that only the trademark owner would recognize it. Is it like that or is it just a knockoff part put out there?

Caleb McClain: I’ve seen full frames that are like, full handgun frames, for instance, that are stamped with a brand’s name on it.

Ramsey Russell: Full-blown counterfeit.

Caleb McClain: Absolutely. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: They’re probably not coming from the United States.

Caleb McClain: Some of those are but generally speaking, when it comes like across the board, for all of our counterfeiting, we’re seeing, China is the biggest one. I think that’s what everybody expects. But we do see it everywhere else. I mean, we see them in Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines. We see them in the Middle East, especially, we’ll see them in Turkey, we’ll see them in South America, Brazil is a big counterfeit hotspot, those Colombia and Chile. We see them in Central Asia, India, Pakistan. So it’s really a worldwide issue, Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: Golly, ain’t nothing safest day.

Caleb McClain: No. The biggest problem, I think, is the fact that we as hunters, we spend a lot of money on high-quality gear and products. I mean, we don’t want our stuff to break. And you just start thinking about pick an item that you have, obviously, like gun parts ammunition and archery equipment. That’s safety issues. That’s beyond just quality issues. That’s full-blown safety. But you just think about things that you spend a lot of money on, I mean, some of these brand name knives, $100, $50, $200. Well, what happens when you buy a knife and it ends up not being able to hold an edge, like what you paid for has the wrong steel in it, you go buy optics. You go buy a rifle scope because you want to go deer hunt. I mean, the $20 rifle scope does not look any different than a $2,000 rifle scope. What you’re paying for is you’re paying for the glass and you’re paying for the internal components. And when you think that you have a $2,000 rifle scope and it won’t hold zero and you miss that deer.

Ramsey Russell: You spend that money.

Caleb McClain: Absolutely. And you think of all the different things that you could spend money on and end up having fail. I mean, if you have a 4 season tent and you’re on the side of a mountain in Montana on an elk hunt and you think that it’s 4 season tent and then a 70 miles an hour wind gust blows through and that tent rips, you’re in trouble. You have a GPS unit that you’re tracking yourself way back in the backcountry or back in some of those swamps and bayous duck hunting and that thing stops working, you’re lost.

Ramsey Russell: It just reminded me, my wife got a pair of Birkenstock sandals she’s had since college. She’s had them since college. I go fishing down in Brazil last week and my son’s wearing a pair. And he was saying one day that the heel had come off and he showed me he had to glue something back on. He had to do this, had to do that and he had bought them in Japan. And I said, you might not have checked the spelling on that and it was misspelled.

Caleb McClain: No way.

Ramsey Russell: And he said they were cheaper, but they weren’t that cheap. So, it was a counterfeit with just a slight misspelling.

Caleb McClain: Interesting yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely fell apart.

Caleb McClain: And that’s the exact thing. They might not have been $10 shoes. He might have paid only $10 off of the normal retail price or $20 off a retail. And he thought that he got a deal. That happens with everything now.

Ramsey Russell: Man, in the outdoor industry too.

Caleb McClain: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: So how do you all fight something like these counterfeits with what you do to protect your brands and your clients? Are you running some algorithm to find Brand X gun parts? How do you begin to go with billions upon billions of pages of Internet and places on the market and all this stuff? How do you even begin to find something like that? And to protect your client against something like that? And protect a consumer against something like that?

Caleb McClain: Yeah. So we have a really well-built platform. We actually have a few different platforms that we use. They’re basically databases that they go out and they search the Internet on our behalf, when it comes to marketplaces. I mean, they’re searching through 1400 plus marketplaces across the world. So it’s not just eBay and Amazon. We’re going way into the depths of it. We see them, we go through sites that are owned by Alibaba out in China. We go through business to business sites where you can find manufacturers. We go through all the shopping sites across the world which are very common in Southeast Asia and also in South America. And what we do is we use different keywords. We have a list that we’ve already made that we know works, but also we work with each brand to figure out exactly like, hey do you have a specific model of item, that’s maybe really popular or really popular in other countries. So each one’s unique, but them all we have to do is we have an analyst team that’s based all around the world. They do fantastic work. They search down, they filter down all the results into ultimately finding the most important and the most egregious issues. And then we go directly to the marketplace or to the social media platform or to the entities behind the website, which we call like the Registrar and the ISP. Those are fancy industry jargon words that just mean the entities behind it. And we’ll go to them and we’ll just tell them straight up, you can’t do this, you can’t have this on here. A lot of the time, I would say most of the time we’re successful at it.

Ramsey Russell: When you say, I go to them and tell them you can’t have it on there. You go to the marketplace website, you go to Alibaba or you go to Amazon and tell them, you can prove to them that this is a counterfeit product.

Caleb McClain: Absolutely and some of them, they take our word for it. We have great relationships with a lot of these platforms. I mean a lot of them our corporation is big enough to where, we have weekly meetings with some of these big guys and we even have some people in my role across the world, who might develop personal relationships with people there. That way they can speak in real time, that way they can constantly communicate and express any issues that our clients have or that we have. So it’s a really great system, honestly.

Outdoor Industry Scams to Be Aware Of

So a huge one that’s popped up since COVID has been completely fake, gun and ammo sites, these are just perfect copies almost of different firearm or ammunition sites. 

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Wow. What are some of the other areas that people in the outdoor industry, so we got counterfeits. What are some of the other problems online?

Caleb McClain: Yeah. So a huge one that’s popped up since COVID has been completely fake, gun and ammo sites, these are just perfect copies almost of different firearm or ammunition sites. And got to think, during COVID during the pandemic, everybody was buying guns. I can’t remember how many, I think they said like, 4 or 5 million new gun owners in one year. That was in 2020, I believe. You got to think. We all know we go to our local store, we don’t have ammo on the shelves. Where do we go, we go online. And a lot of these people might not have known that there was a little bit of an issue, but I really started seeing them pop up in 2020. I’d see them on Facebook groups. Somebody would say a new member would join. They would just joined and you’d look at their friends on Facebook and all their friends would very clearly not be from America. And then they say, hey, go buy. Hey, come look at my website, whatever, Allaboutammo.com or something like that. I don’t know that making that up on the spot. And then you go click on it and, yeah, they’ll ship a gun to your front door, which listeners, if somebody says that they can ship a gun to your front door, they can’t.

Ramsey Russell: No, you got to go to FFL.

Caleb McClain: Exactly. There is nothing about that that’s legal in any state in America. FedEx won’t do it, UPS won’t do it, USPS certainly will not do it.

Ramsey Russell: Are they counterfeit guns and ammo?

Caleb McClain: They’re not even selling guns. They’re just taking the money.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, good god.

Caleb McClain: Yeah, exactly. A lot of times, they’ll have every type of ammo that you could possibly imagine. And I’d even kind of mess with some of the people who didn’t have websites set up, who were just scammers, who would create accounts and message people and I’d mess with them, and I’d make up a caliber and I’d say, hey, do you have 8.12/37 Winchester rounds? Oh, yes, great. I need 12 boxes of it. Okay, $30 a box. We chuckle at that. But if there was an actual caliber and somebody actually wanted 12 boxes at $30 a box plus $25 shipping. They’re almost out $400. And I saw that Ramsey, in some of these hunting groups that I’m in, every single week for the entirety of 2020.

Ramsey Russell: Can you imagine, during the supply chain disruption, shotgun shells and bullets were so hard to come by. We were all looking for them. And all of a sudden you stumble across a shiny, sparkling new web page that’s got everything you want in stock and they’re sitting overseas. And most of us don’t know how to find you, even if you ain’t, we don’t know how to find an IP address or how to locate somebody. We’re just done. We’re gone, our money is gone.

Caleb McClain: Exactly. And that was the problem. And we’d have people paying via, this is another little thing for anybody who’s listening. Take this little bit of knowledge. If you can pay via gift card or you can pay via some kind of money transfer app or money wiring system and they’re not just asking for credit card for that. It’s probably not real. I mean, real businesses are going to accept the major credit cards. They’re not going to want you to pay in my iTunes gift cards.

Ramsey Russell: Or bitcoin.

Caleb McClain: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. It reminded me of talking about the credit card, totally unrelated subject. But back in September 22, not just past September 1 before, I was eating breakfast. Beautiful lodge with some great friends, as a guest down around Matagorda. Beautiful place. Most beautiful breakfast I eat every year. And as I sat down, they brought it out and hadn’t everybody sat down yet, I looked at my phone and very uncommon, characteristically, I had 1000s of unread emails and I never had more than half dozen. I check them all and respond. And as I opened it up, it was just steadily adding and adding. And by the time, so I break into a sweat, 1000s are piling in and they’re all from foreign countries, third world countries, just gibberish and everything else. And I start deleting it and it’s just piling on and piling on, after breakfast 10,000 unread emails. At the end of the day, 30,000 unread emails.

Caleb McClain: Oh, man.

Ramsey Russell: And I asked my web guy and my wife, had we been hacked or something going on? And the first thing my wife wrote back is, don’t delete anything. And she got on the phone with Microsoft. And what had happened is, years ago, I had bought something legit, using that American Express. And I know, we can kind of date it because of the email address I used. It wasn’t much. We found the order or whatever it was and let’s say it was $36 and somebody had gotten that information and with an address down the Mississippi Gulf coast, had bought $78 worth of ladies, plus size ladies blue jeans on levi.com. And what that kind of scam or whatever that does is they then submit your email address to these, whatever these sites that begin to just flood your email. And what you do is start delete, delete. You just delete 1000s of emails and they’re steady piling on. And you delete the email from levi.com that says, oh, somebody just pay your $78 worth of blue jeans are being sent. And then they can repeat it and they can do it and they can do it and they can do it. Well, we got it cleared up, but not without a lot of stress. It took, I think, blocking and banning 1000s of email, actually countries. Literally, if you’re in Lithuania and you send me an email, I ain’t going to get it. That’s just a fact. If you’re in a lot of those little countries like that Eastern Block, I’m not going to get it. If it’s legit, you just have to call me. We ended up blocking ISP originations is how we fix that problem. And when we contacted Levi, we meet my wife when we contact Levi to let them know, they just shrugged it off. It happens to them so much they didn’t care. That’s crazy, isn’t it?

Caleb McClain: That is an interesting little ploy and it just shows that, really they’re out to make a dollar any way they can.

Ramsey Russell: Well, we’re leading up because, I know as we get down through some of this stuff, we’ve talked about counterfeits, we talked about fake gun and ammo sites and I know mine was more closely related to a phishing scam of sorts. And that kind of leads into, it’s why you don’t click links.

Caleb McClain: Exactly

Ramsey Russell: It’s why if you won something like a free all inclusive Argentina duck hunt. It says free and all inclusive. You don’t have to enter information.

Caleb McClain: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: So, something’s up. And talk about some of the phishing scams that you get involved with pursuant to brand protection.

How to Protect Your Company & Yourself from Phishing

Caleb McClain: Yeah, so a phishing scam. If anybody doesn’t know, we all know what they are, even if we don’t know what they are, we know not to click on, tax season coming up. So an IRS email, don’t click on it, don’t log in, don’t put information. Okay. That’s just one of those little rules. But basically all they do is they just copy the source code from a website so that it looks indistinguishable from a real website. So if they wanted to do getducks.com, they would just literally hit, it’s 2 buttons on your keyboard and it’ll pull up the entire source code and you can copy that perfectly. And so, once upon a time, I say that like it was a long time ago. We’re talking about like three or four years ago. The main form of these was getting them by email, finding them in Google searches, somebody goes types in super cheap, insert brand name or extra cheap or discount or sale and then that’s where they’d find them. And or they’d even mistype in the URL. So instead of getducks.com, getducks.com, they might type in .net, they might type in getducks, like singular duck or G-I-T ducks.com, that’s one way that people find them – it’s becoming less common. The bigger issue and this is really big in 2022 and I have a feeling it’s going to be huge going into this year. And so anybody listening, seriously, this is big because, it’s not just hunting brands, it’s everything. When you’re typing in searches, you’re trying to find a brand, you’re clicking on their website, you have Facebook and Instagram trying to do targeted advertisements to you. Well, what ends up happening is that the exact same data that would, let’s say you’re looking at getducks.com and you find a getducks. I’m just picking on you because –

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, sure.

Caleb McClain: But that would maybe pull up a Git Ducks advertisement, might also pull up the fraudulent advertisement. And if it says all duck hunts 35% off today only, it probably Isn’t true. And that goes for every single item that you could possibly find. I think a perfect example of this, so this past year, my wife and I were having a child and my mom was scouring the Internet for the best car seat. She ends up forwarding over a link to my wife, Taylor and says, we’ve got to buy this now. And it was from a big box baby store, 75% off all car seats. And I looked at it and I was like well that’s not real. Ramsey, I promise you, the very next day, my dad calls me and he says, man, this boot brand that I’m looking at getting some of is 75% off.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Caleb McClain: And I said, come on, you know what I do for a living. And he said, it looks like their real website. I said, tell you what, go to their real website. So he goes on Google, finds the real website. He said, it’s not the real website. I said, go back to that other one. Instead of .com it was .cc. Then he scrolls down on Facebook a little bit further. He finds another one .co then he scrolls down on Facebook a little bit. And completely unrelated to the brand name, it just said it was Kookie, kookie.shop. But it was the exact same thing. And nowadays, since everybody’s on their phone, you don’t see the little URL in the top anymore. It’s not like when you’re on a computer.

If It Sounds Too Good to Be True, It Probably Is

If they can make a dollar, they’re going to make the dollar.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, but seriously, how many times do you look at a computer anyway? We’re blinded by 75% off. Reminds me, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Caleb McClain: It absolutely is. And, Ramsey, what’s funny is that we all know not to trust everything on the Internet. I couldn’t tell you how many times I heard that growing up. Don’t trust everything on the Internet. And yet we’re falling for it all over again.

Ramsey Russell: But this is what’s becoming such huge as these fake websites, these phishing scams, these rip off and it’s being aiding and abetted somehow another they are using the metadata algorithms on social media platforms. So if you search for boots, we all know that if you went over to Google and search for a brand of cowboy boot, that your Instagram feed is going to be covered up with cowboy boots. What you’re saying is a lot of them are going to be 75% off because it’s fake. They’re either going to send you a fake product or a counterfeit product or they ain’t going to send you nothing at all.

Caleb McClain: That’s more likely, the thing is that you ain’t going to get a single product. You’re going to end up out, maybe $100 and you think well or even if it’s $50, let’s say and you’re like, well, it’s only $50. I learned my lesson, okay. But they’re relying on –

Ramsey Russell: Millions.

Caleb McClain: Less than 1% of people who see that advertisement to click on it and fall for it. Yeah, so if they run that advertisement and running ads on Facebook and Instagram cheap, I’ve seen where you can hit 1000 people for like $5 or something like that $10. And so, if they get, let’s say, 5 out of every 1000, that’s 0.5% of all people and they make $50 on them, they did pretty good. And it’s replicable and it’s scalable and you can do it with more than one website.

Ramsey Russell: Well, there’s 8 billion people on Earth. There’s 300 million Americans. A million folks get frauded out of $50. That’s a pretty good windfall for some scammers.

Caleb McClain: That’s a lot of cash.

Ramsey Russell: And probably tax free.

Caleb McClain: And so the big thing for us is just pay attention to stuff. Think through it. Like you said, don’t get blinded by the 75% off. It happens to the best of us. I’m not going to say that it’s like, don’t feel ashamed if you fall for it, because everybody does at some point. But it’s one of those things just take a second. It’s not going to go anywhere. Go check the real website and it’s not going to be just big stores either. I think that’s something that’s very important to pay attention to, like what we were talking about early on. They’re going to hit everybody from the biggest corporation, down to somebody making products in their garage. If they can make a dollar, they’re going to make the dollar.

Ramsey Russell: Yup.

Caleb McClain: And then along the lines of that is, where we end up in your situation?

Ramsey Russell: Well, this is where we got a few weeks ago, down the rabbit hole is when I asked you, who the F bomb are these people and what are they doing with, what are they doing, besides ruining a good thing? Because them sitting there siphoning it off is really not major, the feedback and the participation has been immense. But there’s been enough people flagged off that may be unaware that there’s a legitimate contest going on. Who are they and what are they doing? Is it a him, is it a them, is it like one person sitting in a dark basement, is it 50 people sitting in a cubicle? Where do they come from and who are they? What are they doing?

Caleb McClain: Yeah. So these people, they’re all around the world. In your case, after digging around a little bit and just doing a little bit of sleuthing, I think that they were probably based out of Indonesia, especially because one of the, I think 7 accounts, 8 accounts, something ridiculous like that. It felt like a million accounts even had left up, they left up an Indonesian website link on accident on one of their accounts. But it could be one individual. But a lot of the time, these are criminal organizations and enterprises. It’s not just you know Bob in the garage next door messing with is, this is a well thought out process. What they’re doing, Ramsey, they’re going out, they’re creating a fake Instagram page, that has nothing to do with you originally and they’re going to gain 500 or 1000 followers, make it look legit. Then they’re going to be looking for these giveaways or these-

Ramsey Russell: Well, looking at some of those accounts, some of those follows, they weren’t, I mean, they look like maybe other fake people, like people in the game to do this scam or something. There were some legit ones on there. You told me one of those accounts had, whatever 50 or 60 people that actually did follow me.

Caleb McClain: Quite a few of them, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. 20% I think you said, had probably just thought, oh, he started a new account. Which, you know what the crazy thing is, this is the sad thing. It doesn’t shock because of the people running the social media platforms, it doesn’t shock anybody that a hunting or fishing or firearm company had to start a new account on social media, because you posted something getting shot and you got blocked. You start a new account.

Caleb McClain: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: That stuff does happen. So it could make sense, it could make sense. How did they so quickly find and recognize that a giveaway like this was a big deal?

Caleb McClain: Ramsey, that’s one part I really don’t know. That is one part that it kind of blew me away.

Ramsey Russell: You got the feeling that they don’t duck hunt.

Caleb McClain: Yeah, I’m assuming they weren’t following you originally, just enjoying all your content. As great as it is. I’m sure that’s not how they found it. It might have been through hashtags. They can find stuff if it’s like hashtag giveaway and stuff like that and then all they do is they go say, well, heck, he’s got x amount of followers. That’s quite a nice following that we might be able to mess with and you go take that again, we’re going to the less than 1% rule. What do you have on Instagram, is it 40 or 50,000 followers, something like that?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Caleb McClain: Yeah. They take less than 1% of that. They’re doing pretty good.

Ramsey Russell: And all I saw was a fake account and screenshots is what I were seeing because I was blocked. I did get on one of them through my wife account and take a look at it but it went to, you won and my page or my picture and all this stuff and some verbatim off of my contest and then it just got into a bunch of gibbers that made no sense whatsoever related to a duck hunt giveaway. And it always had a link, which tiny.com URL. That ought to be a handoff right there. That’s not a legit thing.

Caleb McClain: Generally, no. And if your message that you won something, just anywhere you go, you probably didn’t. And I think that what a lot of your users or what a lot of your users, but listeners did, where they messaged you, they called you, they reached out to you was the best way to do it because they were like, hold on, they had the thought behind it to say, this doesn’t look right. And that’s really ultimately what we have to do in this age.

Ramsey Russell: What was the link? I know you did some research. They actually went out and created accounts.com something web page that they were link into. What did it seem that they were trying to get? What was the purpose? They weren’t giving away a hunt. What were they mining for? What were they phishing for?

Caleb McClain: Yeah. So they were looking for any bit of personal information that you’d enter. I went on to the first website, I didn’t go beyond that into the register here to try to figure out exactly what they were doing. They can make some money if that register here just redirects to somewhere else and they can make money off the redirects. That’s probably not what it was. More likely than not, it was trying to pull personal information to sell it. So when you hear about, you hear all the fraud prevention commercials about your personal info on the dark web, well, more or less. That’s what that could have been. They could have been requesting like, hey, we just need you to pay a $50 fee to finalize it or pay for this small thing, or we need to enter a credit card number for, safety of the contestant. That could have also been what it was.

Ramsey Russell: It was crazy. I’ll tell you. It was so unnerving to me, for the first week for a lot of different reasons. It was so unnerving. I wished I could take the contest back. I wished I could pull it offline and just walk away, but I can’t. I’m in.

Caleb McClain: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: You know what I’m saying? I’m in this thing and I’m committed to it. I’m just not going to be hustled by somebody like this. I’m dedicated to doing this. But one of the most frustrating aspects of it, was you sent me a link, so knowing, I guess, it would take me an eternity to find where the form was that I send in to complain and file the copyright infringement and I also threw in trademark for good measure, because they both were. But, what the most disheartening thing to me was that to this day, I have not heard anything from anybody on Instagram. No follow up, no messages, no nothing. Hey, we’ve taken care of this. I go on somebody’s account and look and find out or ask somebody that says that the account has been taken down. And I don’t know, I lost count because I went fell off in a whole in the world. But when I left, it was, I’m going to say, a half dozen accounts or more, plus that website that you were able to get taken down eventually. And the first time that I filed a complaint with, who was that? It had been a blogger. It was a blog page.

Caleb McClain: Yeah, it was blog spot. So it was just owned by Google.

Ramsey Russell: I said, this is my name, this is my webpage, these are my copyrighted pictures. They are infringing on a registered trademark called getducks.com. And they just flippantly wrote back, well, we can’t see, no proof and nothing. None of the above. So it’s fine. You can appeal this. I’m like, what? Why is it taking social media so slow to respond, if at all? That’s the first question. Why is it taking so long for them to respond?

Caleb McClain: Well, Ramsey, I’m never going to be an apologist for any of these companies, but I do know right now, they have let it be known that with some of the layoffs at over Meta, which is Instagram and Facebook, for those of you who don’t know, they have slowed their response time a little bit. But as far as the response to that Google gave on there, I found that to be not surprising. It’s not just Google. It’s the fact that they have people who are answering from all over the world. They’re not trained in any specific brand and though we look at it, we’re like, well, no duh. That’s infringing like, It’s a picture of you with your logo next to it, with your pictures on the page, with everything about it perfectly just textbook, not just textbook copyright infringement, textbook trademark infringement, but also it’s a textbook scam. We look at that and we say, well, duh, but maybe the person who reviewed it just didn’t see it that way. And that’s when we got a little bit deeper into that enforcement and we started annoying them quite a bit.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And you knew just how to go and what to do. How many accounts would you say, it is there for a minute it seemed like they were just going to go away. Okay, this is not low hanging fruit. This is not easy. But they seem to have regathered. Now they’re becoming a little more duplicitous, the way they’re spelling the word and making it look real and stuff like that.

Caleb McClain: Yes, the first ones we had, like you said, about a half dozen that popped up and we knocked that website down and you went off to Brazil and I was thinking fantastic, we’re doing good, I didn’t see, I was expecting them every single day. I guess I left out on last Thursday and went to go do some camping and duck hunting, across Texas. And then Saturday, I think it was Saturday, you messaged me and said, I just got a message about another one.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Caleb McClain: And so that was, we went almost a full week without one. We popped up 2 more and that one was and I can’t even think of where that one was done at, where they made that one. But I ended up being able to figure out where to pull that one down pretty fast. And I think they knocked that down the next day. And one of the accounts is still live, but it has no content remaining. So that’s good. And I don’t think they’re messing with anybody.

Ramsey Russell: I block a lot of people throughout the course of social media. And by that I mean, you get the inboxes from somebody, some apparently attractive woman wants to be friends. Well, I know better, block and I had the choice of blocking that account and any other account originating from that ISP. So I block it all. Anything coming from this guy or his lookalike, I’m done. And why wouldn’t, are the people that are perpetrating these kind of frauds? Do they just have so many ISPs or is the social media platform just saying, okay, this one, I know this one’s a problem, but the next one come from this ISP, may not be. It seemed like they could just put the smart bomb on it and get rid of all of them coming out of that shop in one fell swoop, but they don’t. And it enables these people to keep coming back.

Caleb McClain: Well, and also you know, we can change our IP address pretty easily and so can they.

Ramsey Russell: Okay

Caleb McClain: We have VPN services. Some of them are free, but some of them, you might pay $10 a month, $5 a month, they’re little Google Chrome extension and bam, all of a sudden, instead of having your computer saying that it’s located in Brandon, Mississippi, it might say that it’s located in Lexington, Kentucky or it might say that it’s located in Bogota, Colombia. And so, a lot of, they do a decent job at catching some of these early, but obviously, these people are just flooding them and it’s constant, and that’s how they make their money. And I mean, in the same way that you invest a lot of money into your company and you invest into having the best everything that you can, they’re investing into having the best everything that they can.

Ramsey Russell: I see. What are some ways that, I’ve seen these fraud accounts with not famous people, with just regular people?

Caleb McClain:  Oh, yeah

Ramsey Russell: I’ve seen it just everywhere. I’ve known lots of people, in the advent of social media platforms that have had to start new accounts because they were ripped off or have had to fight this battle. What would you tell anybody listening, company or individual, otherwise, how do you begin to mitigate this?

Caleb McClain: Well, Ramsey –

Ramsey Russell: Call concerts.

Caleb McClain: Yeah, I was going to say, Corsearch will definitely help you out, but if you’re an individual, obviously that’s not effective whatsoever. If you’re an individual trying to report it as many times as possible, even just with the, this is me, somebody’s ripping off my account. That actually is a way that they will take stuff down. Having your friends reported is a scam, especially when they post the little link up in the bio on the Instagram account.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah

Caleb McClain: As far as with bigger companies, sometimes once you hit a certain size, that’s when it’s worth looking into people, who do intellectual property protection for a living, because obviously, a big corporation can’t handle it all on their own and they certainly can’t have eyes on the ground. I mean, we had again 8 social media accounts and 2 websites in a matter of a week and a half that we had to deal with.

How To Protect Your Personal Finances, Business Brand & More from Scams

For the love of God, do not click on stuff. Do not enter information if you don’t know what it is.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, similar to that question, but what are some rules of thumb for protecting yourself, like in terms of your personal finances and also protecting your platform or your brand? What are some rules of thumb, takeaway, you’re talking about some of this stuff getting bigger and bigger, bolder and bolder. I mean, what are some rules of thumb, besides never click, never click on it.

Caleb McClain: For the love of God, do not click on stuff. Do not enter information if you don’t know what it is. If it is a real company, maybe let’s just pretend like it is a real company, give the actual corporate office that you find on the website a call, not on the website that you clicked on, but, when you go to Google and you type in, let’s say, getducks, Ramsey Russell, getducks. And then you go click on that very first option there. In this case, give Ramsey a call but don’t click, do not enter bank information. Certainly, do not try to pay with gift cards. Don’t trust things that you see. If you’re a corporation, you’re trying to get out ahead of it. Register your trademarks, like what you were saying earlier. Absolutely. If you have something that’s unique to you, that is unique to your branding, get it register. I mean, it’s a little bit of a pain. But certainly, if somebody in China goes and registers that trademark because they find out how good you’re doing and then it’s a heck of a lot bigger pain, when you have to get that back in a court battle. And that’s an expensive pain, and you might not get it back, which is something that we’ve seen plenty of times. If you have like regional partners, who are making like – if getducks decided to also have someone operating GetDuck South America, I don’t know, have a list of every single Instagram account and Facebook account, every bit of information that you can that is yours. Go out there, get your account verified if you can. It was like the little blue check mark next to it. Those are all very just tried and true methods and ultimately be a little suspicious.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Never trust nobody.

Caleb McClain: No. People are out there to make a buck on you.

Ramsey Russell: It’s not getting easier, is it? The technology is getting slicker and slicker.

Caleb McClain: Ramsey. It ain’t like Mississippi, where a handshake agreement is all that you need in somebody’s word. This is changed quite a bit.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I’ll tell you this, Caleb, I really appreciate you coming on.

Caleb McClain: I appreciate you having me.

Ramsey Russell: Corsearch.

Caleb McClain: Yes sir.

Ramsey Russell: Corsearch is the name of you all’s company and this is what you all do. And it’s a growing industry, and it’s becoming a big problem. And as more of us are piling on and sharing our stuff, the people I think of are like some of these content creators. I can’t imagine some of the stuff they might be going through or potentially, because on the one hand, you’re putting all your artwork out there, but who knows where you’ll see it. I actually found, years ago found just a picture I took and I’m not a huge content creator, but I actually found a picture I took used in a competitor’s sale.

Caleb McClain: Really?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. But it wasn’t their fault directly. It had been provided to them through one of their vendors.

Caleb McClain: Wow.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And it was kind of a big deal. Singularly, the best picture I ever took. And not only did the people that submitted it to them, but they had cropped out. I had a big logo on there and they had cropped out the logo and sent it to.

Caleb McClain: Wow.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. The minute I opened the catalog, I go, wait a minute, that’s my picture. There’s a million different ways that they could use it. I mean, they could steal your artwork, mine yours, anybody, especially good artwork. And put it on a fake web page just to con people into thinking, hey, this is great. It’s only 75% off. It’s a multitude of ways these guys could do this kind of stuff.

Caleb McClain: Absolutely. Every single day that we think that we have them fully figured out, they throw us a curveball.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a big dangerous world out there, and we’re all connected in social media. We’re all doing this stuff. You don’t have to be big, you don’t have to be famous, you don’t have to be giving something away. You just got to be cognizant. And guys hope you all got something out of this episode, I sure did. And it’s been a very dawning process for the last month. And appreciate you all listening. And Caleb, I really appreciate your help.

Caleb McClain: Yeah, absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: Folks. Ramsey Russell’s, getducks, the one, the only, the original. Go check out the pin post for how to apply to a free, all expense paid Argentina duck hunt. I will call the winner personally and all you got to do is meet me at the airport, we’re going to go duck hunt. That’s how this stuff works. But thank you all for listening to this episode of Duck Season Somewhere, we’ll see you next time.