When a website, a profile or a page uses a company's name or logo to deceive people, the most direct path is usually to ask whoever hosts the content to remove it. That request has a name: takedown.
Who receives the request
It depends on where the content is:
- Domain: the registrar, the company where the address was registered.
- Website: the hosting provider, where the pages are stored.
- Profile or page on a social network: the social network itself, through its trademark misuse reporting channels.
For .br domains, there is also the path through Registro.br and SACI-Adm, the administrative procedure for domain name disputes.
Each one has its own rules and forms. What they have in common is that they all decide based on what the request shows.
What a good request needs
- The exact address of the website, profile or page.
- The brand and who owns it, preferably with the trademark registration with INPI (the Brazilian trademark office).
- The reason: what the content does wrong (imitates customer service, copies the logo, asks for data or payments).
- The authorization of the company for whoever sends the request on its behalf.
- The evidence: how the page looked when the problem was found.
Incomplete requests tend to come back with questions, and each round gives the scam more time online.
Why sealed evidence matters
Scam pages change fast. A website may change its content, go offline for a few hours and come back, or show a different page to visitors coming from elsewhere. A profile may change its name. Without proof of how it looked, it is the word of whoever requests against the word of whoever is reported.
Sealed evidence solves this with three parts:
- A screenshot of the page as it was at the time of capture.
- An integrity code (SHA-256), calculated over the file. Any change, however small, produces a different code.
- A timestamp that records when the capture was made.
Together, these parts show what was seen and when, and make it possible to verify later that nothing was altered. The same evidence serves the takedown request and, if needed, other measures.
After the request
The decision to remove belongs to whoever receives the request. That is why the work continues after it is sent: checking whether the address went offline, answering questions from the registrar, the provider or the social network, and watching whether the content comes back.
How Patentiq does it
At Patentiq, the takedown request is contracted separately. When the company contracts takedown and marks a finding as fraud, the sealed evidence is already stored. The request is sent by Patentiq, with the company's authorization, to the registrar, the provider or the social network, and the company follows each step on the platform. After the request, the address keeps being checked; if it comes back online, the case goes back to review.