Fraudulent Solicitations and Scams
If you own a trademark, you will receive official-looking letters and emails asking for money, to "register" your mark in a foreign registry, to "publish" it, to "monitor" it, or to renew it before an invented deadline. These are scams. Do not respond. Do not pay.
Scammers pull your contact information from public trademark databases the moment an application is filed. If we are your attorney of record, forward anything suspicious to us and discard it. You can also report these solicitations to the FTC at www.FTC.gov.
How to verify your trademark status yourself
A common scare tactic is a notice claiming your trademark is about to expire. Before acting on any such notice, check the official record at the USPTO's Trademark Status and Document Retrieval (TSDR) system and click the Maintenance tab to see your actual next due date.
Official warnings from government and international bodies
The USPTO and other agencies have been publishing warnings about these scams for years:
USPTO: Beware of email scams
USPTO Director: Federal Agencies Tackling Trademark Scams
DOJ: Guilty pleas in a $1.66 million mass-mailing scam involving companies calling themselves Trademark Compliance Center (TCC) and Trademark Compliance Office (TCO)
WIPO: Madrid system warning and PCT warning
A federal judge recently sentenced one scammer to four years in prison and more than $4.5 million in restitution, covering losses to over 2,900 trademark owners. Coverage: Law360 and JDSupra.
The problem is global enough that the TM5, the group comprising the five largest trademark offices (USPTO, EUIPO, Japan Patent Office, Korean Intellectual Property Office, and China National Intellectual Property Administration), has completed a coordinated project to address it.
A word on "trademark watch" solicitations
Some companies try to scare trademark owners into paying for daily "monitoring" of their USPTO status. One such pitch quotes a "discounted" price of $318.75. That service is worthless. When we are your attorney of record, the USPTO notifies us automatically of any action involving your marks.
A legitimate watch service is different: it monitors third-party filings for potentially confusing marks so you can oppose them. The scam operators do not offer that and are not equipped to. If you want a real watch service, ask us and we will set one up with a reputable provider.
Examples of scam solicitations our clients have received
Do not respond. Do not pay. The first two below typically arrive within days of a new application filing.
Patent and Trademark Agency (2 Versions)
Universal Patents and Trademark Service – International Renewals
Law firms mining the USPTO database
A separate category: law firms that scrape public USPTO data to drum up business. For example:
Domain Name Scams
A related category of solicitation targets domain names. These operators claim they will register your trademark as a domain or keyword in foreign countries to "protect" you or to "eliminate consumer confusion." Most of these offers are not worth the money.
The sound practice is to register your key domains defensively and early. At a minimum, secure the common variants of your primary domain (.com, .co, .net, .info, .org, .me, .mobi, .us, .ca) when they are available, and point them all at your primary site. Registering variations upfront is far less expensive than fighting an infringement later.
Country-code domains (.de, .cn, .br, and so on) are a separate question. Many countries require a bona fide business establishment or physical presence before they will issue a local domain. For clients operating internationally, we generally recommend focusing on the countries where you actually sell, manufacture, or deliver services. That is usually the right starting point.
Contact us
If you are unsure whether a notice is legitimate, send it to us before you act on it. We can confirm within minutes whether it is a scam.