Consumer Rights Against Fake Brand Website: An Indian Legal Analysis with Comparative Perspectives

ABSTRACT
Fake brand websites, including phishing pages, spoofed domains, and counterfeit marketplaces, present a complex consumer-protection challenge to jurisdictions around the world. This paper explores the remedies available to consumers, as distinguished from brand owners, in cases when they have been defrauded by such resources.
By examining Indian law in tandem with American and European practices, it identifies jurisdiction-specific strengths and weaknesses in the relevant legal frameworks. Based on a doctrinal and comparative analysis of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, trademark, passing-off, and cybercrime legislation, and a review of Indian judicial trends from early Yahoo! cases to recent rulings on marketplace liability, the paper finds that India possesses a broad but fragmented set of remedies better at responding to the harms to brand owners than individual consumers.
It argues that India has yet to exploit the potential of its consumer-protection infrastructure, particularly the Central Consumer Protection Authority, in countering deceptive domain names and websites.