Is there a “good ole days” when it comes to fraudulent practices? Back in the days when phone books were the main go-to for information about entities and people, fraud seemed more, well, personal. Clients calling in often complained of the fake by angrily objecting to “our” service or by simply reporting it. Finding the perpetrator was a local sleuthing expedition and allowed staff the opportunity to make prank calls to assess where these people were located and what the scam was. Local laws and strong cease and desist letters seemed relatively easy to produce to force action.
There is something about today’s fraudulent practices. Whether doing targeted mailing solicitations or posing as our organization online, our target now is often outside of our local community, more unknown and unseen. Easy sleuthing is difficult to come by, and even their intentions can be mixed. They can be those who want to capitalize on your name because it gets a lot of traffic and hope to siphon some of that traffic to purchase their unrelated goods or services. They can be of the sort that profess to do exactly what legal aid programs do, except charge. Or, they can be an honest Joe, simply just trying to take advantage of commonly-used search terms that a user might type in to drive traffic to their site, unwittingly appearing in the sponsored link with the exact name of your more generic sounding legal aid program.
Last year, in partnership with Pine Tree Legal Assistance, NTAP reviewed to what extent fraudulent practices by online vendors were impacting legal aid organizations. Here's the summary: Whether you know it or not, there is a strong chance that your client community is confused when trying to search for your program name online. And, whether you know it or not, there is a very strong possibility that your website URL brothers and sisters have deceptive websites posing as you and charging for services.
Cyber piracy is only one part of deceptive practices that steal our strongest intellectual property – our name. Legal aid programs are still fighting local scams from phone book posers. Increasingly, we’re finding national scams via mailers targeting our client community.
While cyber piracy involves the Internet, it is not a technological issue. Cyber piracy and other offline deceptive practices that confuse your client community are programmatic issues of the 21st century that require directors to manage them proactively.
Most legal aid programs have fire insurance on their building or worker’s comp insurance for their employees. While there is no “fraudulent practices insurance”, NTAP – in conjunction with national partners – NLADA, LSC, Pro Bono Net, and the ABA – have created some practical protocols that can act as the framework from which each legal aid program can pursue optimal protections for their programs and their client communities. Many of these protocols are worded around cyber piracy, but are effective approaches to preventing any scam – online or offline.
NTAP has put together a sample protocol for managing such practices as your first step. Consider them a working draft for your program to refine. When you do, please reshare it with us to update this for the field.
Protocols for Protecting your Name
Remedies for Action (Includes both Legal and State Bar Options as presented by Will Hornsby at NLADA Annual Conference, 2007).
