At the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition Annual Conference in Florida, BSA Commercial Director Tony Kirsch spoke with Rafa Gutiérrez, Senior Legal Director at Uber. They explored the escalating threats of phishing and fraud, the persistent challenges of relying solely on AI for detection, and how proactive tools like GlobalBlock help securely maintain a streamlined domain portfolio.
Tony:
Thanks very much for joining me, Rafa. To begin, could you introduce yourself and your role at Uber?
Rafa:
I’m the head of the global brand protection team, which means my team effectively manages everything trademark-related. We protect Uber’s trademark portfolio, do search and clearance, assist other teams with IP review, support our mergers and acquisitions team with due diligence and licensing, and we’re brought in by the marketing or legal team when IP issues come up that are a little more complicated.
We also manage the inbound takedowns that we get about alleged infringements on the Uber Eats platform and all our enforcement efforts around the world. And finally, we manage the domain name portfolio.
Tony:
That’s quite a remit that you’ve got there with your team! How aggressive are the threats against your company right now compared to five years ago?
Rafa:
They’re more aggressive now. We perhaps see fewer standard trademark infringements – filings at the trademark office have probably gone a little bit down over the years. But we do see a big uptick in fraud. A lot of phishing using our domain and on social media, sending people to phishing sites, smishing, sending text messages to drivers . . . that has been increasing, and it’s a moving target. As soon as you shut one site down, they move to another site or change hosting providers. So, it’s an ongoing target, a little bit of Whac-A-Mole.
Tony:
Let’s talk about AI and automation. How has it changed the game?
Rafa:
We work with a number of online vendors who do our online enforcement, and we’ve seen it as a tool that they use to identify any type of infringement site, but we’ve also seen a number of limitations of AI.
Sometimes people go back to the old school, and it can trick the new school. Some of our vendors use image detection, but we’ve seen ‘obfuscation,’ where counterfeit merchandise sellers for example, will make adjustments to the images they’re using – pixelate them, blur them, do things to cover our logo – to an AI detection system it is different enough. It doesn’t hit the similarity score that they’re looking for, so it’ll pass on this thing. But we can find them doing standard word searches.
So, we’ve had to go back to our vendors and say, ‘you can’t rely solely on the AI image search, and you’ve got to do some of these word searches.’
Tony:
How much of this are you able to do proactively, or is it simply a game of monitoring as much as possible?
Rafa:
We have a couple of different vendors who use different models for monitoring. One of them relies heavily on AI, and looks at domains, but what’s tough for us is that a lot of times we have to wait until content appears on the domain, because registering a domain in and of itself doesn’t necessarily reflect malicious intent.
Sometimes the domain is registered, and we can see there’s MX records attached to it, but until we can get one of those emails with the headers in them, a lot of the registrars or the hosting providers won’t disable that domain, because they’ll say, ‘Well, we have no proof that this is being used for bad things.’
And so, really, the best that we can do is to stay ahead of it, look for key indicators of bad activity, or rely on drivers and restaurants to report them to us.
Tony:
If you had three wishes to make life easier for the organization, what would they be?
Rafa:
First on the takedown front, I think there should be some mechanism where I can attest that I have seen a domain has been used, and represent that I have a merchant who has told me they’ve lost money.
Secondly, proactive blocking in the e-commerce space would be ideal. A lot of the counterfeit items we see are in that space and we’d love to see better efforts to proactively block listings so we’re not constantly submitting takedowns.
And third would be better AI tools for finding these infringements. A lot of the current marketplaces tell us AI can’t make those detections yet. It might be controversial to say but if they’re still getting a cut of every counterfeit purchase, their motivation to remove it may be low.
We’d love to see better efforts to proactively block listings so we’re not constantly submitting takedowns.
Tony:
You brought Uber and Uber Eats to GlobalBlock almost 18 months ago. What motivated you to look at it and what was the tipping point for you to participate?
Rafa:
We were looking at instances where we maybe hadn’t acted quickly enough to register in a new top-level domain, or we questioned if it was relevant, or if it had premium fees attached to it. We thought GlobalBlock would be a good tool to reserve our name in those spaces without having to buy the domain and without having to build this massive defensive portfolio. Then we considered whether we can drop some of the domains that we’re paying for that will be covered by GlobalBlock. One of the things that was an issue for us, as we were viewing our portfolio and as renewals came up, was trying to decide, ‘do we keep this one, do we not?’ We’ve had a number in our portfolio that are covered by GlobalBlock, so we’ve been able to let those go with confidence that nobody else is going to pick them up.
Tony:
We also looked at some of the domains Priority AutoCatch has been able to pick up for you. How does that add value?
Rafa:
That’s a big benefit, because you don’t always get an alert when a domain is not renewed – you have to stay on top of monitoring that. There’s a number of domains that were registered before GlobalBlock came out, so it’s great knowing that if someone let go of those domains, we could get them back. Looking back, in the time we’ve had the service there’s a good number of domains that were re-protected by GlobalBlock because someone got tired of paying the registration fees, and we could sit back and just let it happen.
There’s a number of domains that were registered before GlobalBlock came out, so it’s great knowing that if someone let go of those domains, we could get them back.
Tony:
Is there something you’d like to see from GlobalBlock in the future?
Rafa:
The continued expansion into new top-level domains is always helpful. I’d also like to see a little broader scope of protection. I know there’s a balancing act there but we try to be judicious with our asks and make sure we’re not overstepping our rights. I see the challenges but that would certainly be on the wish list.
Tony:
What’s next for Uber in terms of brand protection at a global level? Any vision for what you’re trying to achieve?
Rafa:
One thing we’re doing right now is a lot of data analytics to see what patterns we can identify in the spaces where we’re doing enforcement. Both online and offline, AI is giving us a big step up in that space.
But as data analytics often does, it reveals gaps in your data. Across vendors and law firms that we use we’re working to put all that data together so we can paint a big picture. Our team does a lot of different things that maybe your average trademark or brand protection team doesn’t necessarily do. And I think being able to paint a big picture of all the different elements of that and stitching all that data together is going to be big for us in the next few years.
Tony Kirsch
