Someone stole our name

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a stranger asking if a job posting was real. Listed under our agency's name. Yes, the same agency I exited, though the legal entity still exists. They used our logo. Our brand. The person wanted to confirm that someone named in the listing actually worked for us and that the position was legitimate. Obviously, they didn't work for us. The position didn't exist.

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Within days, phone calls started coming in — mostly from Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, where this type of scam is apparently massive right now. The scheme is simple: scammers use a real company's identity to post fake job offers. The "jobs" are easy tasks — liking posts, filling out forms. Then at some point, the victim is asked to make a deposit to continue. And the money disappears.

People could be losing real money. Under our name.

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My first instinct — and I'm not proud of this — was to shrug it off. We didn't do this. We're not involved. Let them sort it out. After I exited, I kept a business entity, the brand, but we’re not in agency business anymore. That instinct lasted about ten minutes. Then my brain caught up.

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What "not my problem" actually costs

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If we did nothing, here's what could happen. People who lost money would search for us. They'd find our real website, our real social media, our real contact information. Already did. They'd assume we were part of it — or at least that we knew and didn't care. Some might leave reviews. Some might contact authorities. Some might file complaints or even lawsuits. Not because we did anything wrong — but because our name was on the thing that hurt them.

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Reputation damage from something we didn't do. Legal headaches from something we didn't know about. Time and money spent defending ourselves from something we never asked for. All because we were "too small" for this to happen to us. As I used to think for many years.

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This is the part that stuck with me: I've had situations before — not identical, but the same shape. Unexpected problems that appeared from nowhere and needed immediate action. And the pattern is always the same. The cost of reacting slowly is always higher than the cost of reacting fast. Always.

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What we actually did

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In previous years, this would have meant calling our lawyers, waiting for availability, paying for a consultation, waiting for drafted documents, going back and forth. Minimum a few days. Probably five hundred dollars or more just for the initial advice. This time, I went to Gemini first. Not for legal counsel — for a first-response protocol. What are the standard steps when your brand is used in a fraud scheme? What should we publish? What should we file? What templates exist for police reports in the relevant jurisdiction?

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Within two hours, we had published a warning on our website and social media. We had filed an electronic report with the Hong Kong police. We had documented every communication from people who'd contacted us — their messages, screenshots of the scam, the fake job listings. And we received official confirmation that we were not involved in the scheme and had taken appropriate action. Two hours. Not two days. Not two thousand dollars.

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I want to be clear about what AI did and didn't do here. It didn't replace a lawyer. For anything more complex — an actual lawsuit, a regulatory investigation, a cross-border dispute — you need real legal professionals, and you need them fast. What AI did was eliminate the blank page. Instead of sitting there thinking "what do I even do first," I had a checklist in three minutes. The thinking and the decisions were still mine. The speed of getting to that first step — that was AI.

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The real lesson underneath

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This isn't really a story about scammers or AI or legal protocols. It's about something I keep running into as a founder, over and over. Things happen that you never planned for. They just do. And the difference between a minor inconvenience and a serious problem is almost never about how bad the thing is. It's about how fast you respond, and whether you have any kind of structure for responding — even a rough one.

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We had a few advantages this time. We'd dealt with unexpected legal situations before, so the shape of the problem wasn't completely foreign. We had relationships with lawyers we could escalate to if needed. And we had AI to compress the research phase from days to minutes. But what if we'd had none of that? What if the first time something like this happened, we had no lawyers, no experience with crises, no idea where to start? The shrug — "not my problem" — would have lasted a lot longer than ten minutes. Maybe long enough for real damage to set in.

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Most small agency founders I talk to don't think about this stuff. "We're too small for anyone to impersonate." "Legal problems happen to big companies." "I'll deal with it when it happens." That last one is the most dangerous, because "when it happens" is exactly when you have the least time and the most pressure to figure it out from zero.

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Something to think about:

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You probably don't have a protocol for brand theft. That's fine — most people don't. But ask yourself a broader question: if something unexpected hit your business on Monday morning — a legal threat, a client dispute, a data breach, a public complaint — do you know what your first three steps would be? Not a detailed plan. Just: who do I call? Where do I document what happened? What do I publish or communicate, and how fast?

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If the answer is "I'd figure it out" — that's the gap. Because "figuring it out" under pressure, with no structure, is how small problems become expensive ones.

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So here's my question: what's the thing you're assuming will never happen to your business — that would catch you completely off guard if it did?

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P.S. We were not a tiny agency last years but definitely not a household name. I genuinely thought nobody would bother thefting our brand. Turns out, scammers don't care about your size. They care about whether you have a real-looking brand they can copy in twenty minutes. If you have a website and a logo, you're a target.