How Cotopaxi prevented fake “Black Friday” sites from stealing real customer orders

With Red Points’ experts building rules that flagged suspicious pricing, stock patterns, repeat imagery, and keyword variations, Cotopaxi went from chasing one fake website at a time to proactively removing over 4,700 fake websites in a month and stopping them before they reached customers.

Overview

Cotopaxi is an outdoor gear brand built on sustainability and social impact. As global demand grew, so did the number of impersonation sites targeting its customers and reputation. The urgency became clear in the lead-up to Black Friday 2021, when 14 fake websites appeared overnight with up to 80% discounts, resulting in missing orders, angry customers, and a spike in support tickets. Protecting Cotopaxi’s community, credibility, and online revenue became mission-critical.

The Challenge

Cotopaxi needed a scalable way to stop fake websites before shoppers were affected. Manual takedowns, domain registrations, and reactive escalation created more work than results, and the volume of scams kept accelerating. The brand needed a brand protection system that could detect earlier, act faster, and prioritize what mattered, without depending on customer complaints.

“We reached a point where the volume, the speed of these threats, the frequency with which they were reported to us by our customers, became too high. We couldn’t keep up.”
— Stephan Jacob, Founder and CGO

The Turning Point

The breakthrough came when Cotopaxi saw that automation combined with strategic monitoring could expose recurring patterns behind fake websites, not just isolated incidents. Through Red Points’ platform, the team uncovered that many scam domains shared the same hosting providers, repeated copy-paste storefront templates, identical copyrighted product image use, and patterns in domain naming (such as “cotopaxicanada,” “cotopaxi-us,” or “cotopaxitrekking”). By layering price- and stock-based automation on top of these signals, Cotopaxi was also able to flag listings with abnormally low prices or unrealistic stock levels.

Once these patterns were identified, Red Points grouped related domains and triggered precise, pattern-level takedowns, removing fake websites in a single action without risking false positives, while continuously uncovering new patterns and insights to strengthen enforcement over time.

“We automate takedowns of listings that are using copyrighted content and images.”
— Stephan Jacob, Founder and CGO

The Solution

Expand detection with targeted search keywords and domain monitoring
Cotopaxi scaled its detection engine by expanding from 67 to more than 1,700 Search Keywords, allowing the team to identify threats across misspellings and language variations. Combined with domain monitoring that detects non-indexed scam websites (not visible in search results), Cotopaxi moved from incident-based discovery to true proactive coverage across channels and regions.

Prioritize by business impact, not noise
Features like custom tags and risk signals helped Cotopaxi categorize threats like rogue sites, MAP violations, and unauthorized sellers, while AI-driven incident scoring highlighted the cases most likely to be true infringements. This ensured the team focused first on the highest-risk actors instead of being distracted by volume.

Automate enforcement with control, to remove repeat work and reclaim time
With image-based enforcement, marketplace rules, and price-and-stock automations, Cotopaxi replaced manual takedowns with a high level of automation across core workflows. Instead of chasing repeat offenders, the team could remove clusters of fake websites at once, preventing 4,000+ scam sites from reaching shoppers.

“Through Red Points’ tech, the people and the team, we’ve been able to reach a 95% automation rate, detecting 110 fraud sites in peak seasons on a monthly basis.”
— Stephan Jacob, Founder and CGO

The Result

Cotopaxi didn’t just automate enforcement; they scaled a long-term brand protection operation that grows with the business. What used to be a draining, reactive process became something predictable, calm, and scalable. Instead of waking up to new crises or hearing from upset customers first, Cotopaxi finally felt ahead of the problem.

Internal workload dropped sharply, giving the team back 130+ hours in a single quarter to focus on growing the brand instead of fighting fires. Enforcement became consistently effective, with a 97% success rate and 4,700+ infringements blocked during peak periods, preventing over $13.5M in fraudulent value from ever reaching shoppers.

Support tickets linked to scams declined, customer confusion eased, and trust began to recover.