Protect Your Business Identity, Corporate Image, and Customer Interests with MTN Web Store

 

Learn how we can help to prevent business identity theft to protect your corporate image and customer interests with our new account registration policy.

In our legacy Classic I'MTP services, all training providers who wanted to get on with us must submit their non-expired HRDF certificate for verification before we can accept them as our members. Therefore, MTN has become the most preferred training marketplace to most companies even until today. They find our listed training providers are at least 100% legitimate if not 100% perfect in terms of services and training quality. But recently, due to the increasing number of business identity theft and social media profile impersonation cases, we find an urgent need to implement a Business Identity Theft Prevention Policy on our MTN Web Store in order to protect the business interests, not only to our site visitors but also to our corporate members on MTN Web Store. 

Typical Business Identity Theft Characteristics

Below are the typical characteristics of business identity theft case:

1. They use your company name and logo to create a profile on certain social media network.
2. They use fake email addresses that may sound like your company email address, e.g. yourcompanyname@gmail.com instead of person.name@yourcompanyname.com or person.name@your-company-name.com (a newly registered domain name that sounds like your company). However, the latter is less likely because not only this is less convenient to them but also need to invest certain amount of money for them to fake about, of which they never expect it to be used for long-term. Therefore, the earlier with the free email provider is more common.
3. They use your brand name to sell unauthorised, unregistered, illegal, and/or rejected products and the victims may still think that they're from your company.

How we do the Business Identity Verification

Due to the resource limitations, however, we can no longer perform a manual verification on each and every new corporate account registration on MTN Web Store. In order to resolve this issue, effective from 1st Mar 2022, on our new account registration page:

1. All new corporate account registrations must have a legitimate website with a matching corporate email domain name, e.g. https://www.companyname.com and your.name@companyname.com. A final email ownership verification is also required or else the entire registration process will fail.
   
   

   

   A legitimate website domain name is required for
   new corporate account registration.

   
   

   

   An error will be prompted when a personal email address is used or
   domain name is not identical with the give website domain name.

   
   
   
2. Personal accounts can no longer have access to our digital marketing services, including Web Store Profile and CloudWorms PDF Viewers. However, for Personal accounts, a website is not required and personal email address is allowed, such as @gmail.com, @hotmail.com etc. This is because many service consumers such as students, would like to register for a training course offered by our corporate account members and most of them only possess personal free email account. But fundamentally, a basic email account ownership verification is still required for Personal account to ensure the email is real, valid, and reachable.
   
   

   

   Personal account type allows personal email address
   but only act as consumer, e.g. students.

   
   

If the above automated verification process is still not enough to prevent business identity theft, the true owner can file a complaint to us by clicking the Report Abuse link at the bottom of the PDF Viewer involved and send any relevant information to our support, including some supporting evidences, for our investigation. Once proven the case or highly suspicious, we'll suspend the said account until the case is resolved within 14 days; otherwise the account will be terminated without any refund.

For Personal MTN account, other than email ownership verification purpose, what other reasons?

Currently, after the implementation of this security policy, the Personal MTN account registration is in fact not necessary at the moment for the following reasons:

1. Most of our corporate account owners only expect for email and phone communication by the site visitors. Some may have linked their call-to-action button to their own online form, but that would subject to their own policy.
2. We have yet to roll out the online form features where visitors need to register for at least a Personal account so that we can send them email notifications and allow them to track their service request status online.
3. We have yet to roll out the features where Personal account no longer need to repeatedly fill up their particulars when making online form enquiries from different providers on MTN Web Store.

We'll make the announcement here when the online form service is available to both the corporate and personal accounts.

For new Corporate account registrations, do we need to wait for the online form service to be available?

The answer is 'no need'. You can go ahead and register for your corporate MTN account and earn free trial credits even before the online form service is available. This is because once your web store profile and PDF viewers are published, search engines like Google may still require some time to crawl, index, and rank your pages on MTN Web Store. Therefore, as far as the online publication is concerned, the earlier the better. Once the online form service is available, you'll be able to reconfigure your existing PDF Viewers' custom call-to-action button to make use of them.

Our Commitment

Helping our corporate members to improve their corporate image and online trust is one of our top priorities because only by doing this, we can help them to gain more business leads and retain them for long. Many of our existing Classic I'MTP members have been with us for 8 to 9 years due to this reason. On the new business model of MTN Web Store, we'll continue to follow the same philosophical principles to deliver a better service, not only to the training industry but also to all other industries as we move on.