Taking down a counterfeit listing is not the same as stopping a counterfeiter.

The listing comes down → the seller creates a new account → the physical inventory is still in a warehouse, waiting to ship. That cycle begins again.

Nearly two decades in brand protection — including building Amazon's global brand relations team and launching seller governance at TikTok Shop — have given Kaleigh Miller a clear view of what speed alone can't fix.

The counterfeiter's business model has one structural advantage that a takedown notice cannot touch: physical inventory.

Remove a listing and the seller opens a new account. Remove that account and the goods are still in a warehouse. "How you actually stop them is to enforce them at the source," says Kaleigh.

That's where most programs stop short. Digital enforcement, run without an offline legal capability behind it, is not a resolution. The industry calls this ‘whack-a-mole’ because the name fits: every takedown is temporary, and the bad actor resurfaces.

"Where MarqLaw comes in is leveraging all of that intelligence that we collect through the online brand protection solution,” says Kaleigh, “and then being able to turn that into offline investigations that are ultimately referred to local law enforcement so they can conduct raids and seize those goods. That's a far more effective way to manage your intellectual property than just the pure whack-a-mole approach."

There's a second risk that sits alongside the first. AI-native enforcement moves fast, but speed without accuracy has its own consequences. Remove an authorized seller by mistake and the brand loses revenue, faces a dispute, and potentially gets sued. "To avoid enforcing incorrectly and removing an authorized seller," Kaleigh says. "We still need a human in the loop. At MarqVision, we're always going to have a human in the loop in some capacity."

The third piece, marketplace relationships, determines whether a notice gets acted on quickly, slowly, or not at all.

Marketplaces are processing millions of enforcement notices a day, many of which are inaccurate or submitted in bad faith. A notice from an unrecognized service provider lands differently than one from a partner with an established profile, a clean submission history, and has spent the time developing relationships with  the platform's brand protection team. "Most platforms have built dedicated portals to manage intellectual property," Kaleigh says. "They will proactively identify suspected infringements, and also process your claims faster based on portal registration."

Registering IP through those portals creates infrastructure. This infrastructure is then used by marketplaces to take larger, more impactful action against bad actors (and their inventory) at scale. 

Digital enforcement alone diverts the current. These key differences are what remove a bad actor from the stream of commerce permanently and shut them off at the source.

If your program ends at the takedown, you’re simply running maintenance instead of cleaning out the bad actors. Connecting online enforcement to offline investigation, marketplace relationships, and human judgment is how removals that once felt temporary will become permanent.

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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next time.

The MarqVision Team