WARNING:  Watch Out for Trademark Scams!

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (the USPTO) posts a “Warning to USPTO Customers” on its web site and in its acknowledgments of the receipt of applications to register trademark:             

You may receive unsolicited communications from companies requesting fees for trademark and related services, such as monitoring and document filing . . . . In many instances, applicants and registrants have mistakenly believed that the USPTO has issued these communications or that these companies are affiliated with the USPTO.

Although the USPTO is too discreet to say so, many of these unsolicited communications are scams. When a business, organization, or individual applies for a federal trademark registration, the applicant’s name and address are publicly listed by the USPTO, and this information is freely available to the scammers.   If your application was submitted by an attorney on your behalf, the USPTO will send all official communications to the attorney, not to you.  The scammers try to end run the attorney, however, by sending their official-looking communications directly to you.  Some of the scams are pretty effective, too. Our clients have often called to ask whether the official-looking solicitations they have received are really official, and in some cases have come close to sending the scammers hundreds of dollars for totally unnecessary “services.” 

One of the most official-looking of the solicitations is the “Form TM-2008A” sent to trademark applicants by the “United States Trademark Center “in Washington, D.C., requesting an annual payment of $385 for the USTC’s “Trademark Monitoring and Notification Service.”   With its recitation of information from the recipient’s trademark application, excerpts from the United States Code, and imperative tone, it could easily be mistaken for an official government document.  Only when you read the form carefully will you find a statement that the USTC’s trademark monitoring “is an elective service and is not a legal requirement or a mandatory registration.”   It’s also a waste of $385.

Many other companies in the United States and overseas send out such misleading solicitations for what are essentially useless services.   An example is the Register of International Patents and Trademarks (RIPT) based in Slovakia, which offers to include the trademark in the “International Service and Trademark Directory” for a mere $2,298, to be sent either by check to RIPT in Bratislava or by wire to RIPT’s account in Prague.  Believe us, this is a listing that you can live without.  We can’t resist adding that anyone who sends the money in has truly been RIPT off.     

Because many of the solicitations look like bills, they may be routed directly to your organization’s accounting department.   We know of cases in which accounting departments have come dangerously close to paying these “invoices.”  We suggest, therefore, that you alert your accounting people to these scams.

These scams have been called to the attention of state and federal consumer protection official.  For the most part, though, the scammers fly under the governmental radar.  So we urge our clients and friends to watch out for them.  If you receive anything suspicious, please feel free to contact us.

              Zick Rubin (zrubin@zickrubin.com)                 

Brenda Ulrich (bulrich@zickrubin.com)

© 2009 Zick Rubin