Concept2 is beating brand counterfeiters with LaLiga Tech, leading to extended partnership

Concept2, the global market leader for rowing machines and racing oars, has announced an extended technology partnership with LaLiga Tech to protect its products against online fraud, after making significant progress against counterfeiters in the past year.

Combining Artificial Intelligence tools and dedicated consultancy, LaLiga Tech identified thousands of fake product listings designed to defraud customers, removing each of these threats within a matter of hours. As a result the partnership, which began in 2021, has been extended for a further two years.

Concept2 had previously been suffering a barrage of intellectual property abuse. It regularly found online listings for products bearing the brand name, adverts enticing users with enormous discounts, and web landings that changed daily. With no real product to offer, these scams had been stealing from unsuspecting customers, causing subsequent damage to Concept2 and its global network of resellers.

After turning to Brand Protection, the end-to-end service offered by LaLiga Tech, the tide was quickly turned. Instead of manually filling out forms every time the team found a fake listing, Brand Protection detects and reports these cases automatically, providing the team with the agility to fight back against the counterfeiters and protect their intellectual property.

Brand Protection provides 24/7 monitoring services that detect trademark violations in online marketplaces, web pages and search engine listings. Its series of AI tools ensure that all incidents and logged and reported automatically to the Concept2 team. But crucially, LaLiga Tech provides additional human consultancy that ensures the offending content is quickly removed. Thanks to its trusted partnerships with the world“s largest online search engines and marketplaces, LaLiga Tech has been able to remove 100% of the illegal content it detected, all within a 48-hour time frame.

“When it comes to brand counterfeits, speed and flexibility really matters. When a fake price promotion appears and is pushed aggressively, it is only a matter of minutes before customers become victims. LaLiga Tech has delivered outstanding results, moving as quickly as the scammers to report the threats and providing an expert team that can take the content down. Counterfeiting is a growing threat to the sport industry and we can“t recommend LaLiga Tech“s solution highly enough.”

Silvan Zehnder, IP manager at Concept2 said

Brand Protection forms part of the ecosystem of sport reinvention products offered by LaLiga Tech to help brands, broadcasters, clubs, competitions and federations around the world accelerate their digital transformation. To ensure the most accurate results, its detection engine considers various aspects of the product being sold, including price, sales channel, security certificates, delivery times and user comments.

Other organisations using Brand Protection services include Tomateros de Culiacán, one of Mexico“s leading baseball clubs, Liga Portugal and the Royal Belgian Football Federation. In total, LaLiga Tech helps sports properties to protect over €9 billion worth of content and establish more direct and profitable relationships with their fans.

“All sports brands depend on their online reputation and IP fraud is one of the quickest ways to erode this. Against these organised crime networks, the only way to stay ahead is to maintain cutting-edge technology tools and consult with experts who can adjust strategies as soon as new threats appear. We are delighted to see the improvements Concept2 has achieved in the last year and look forward to deepening this relationship in the coming years.”

Guillermo Rodriguez, Director at LaLiga Content Protection added