|
USPTO Fights Fraudulent
Trademark Solicitations
Guest
blog by Commissioner for Trademarks Mary Boney Denison
The
USPTO has worked hard to fight solicitations from companies fraudulently promising
to protect trademarks, and we have taken a number of steps to help raise
awareness of these schemes in an attempt to limit the number of victims
defrauded. Our agency works closely with federal agencies, including the
Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the United States
Postal Inspection Service to combat the problem.
The
Department
of Justice announced last week that two California men pled guilty in a
mass-mailing scam that targeted owners of U.S. trademark applications. The men,
Artashes Darbinyan and Orbel Hakobyan, admitted to stealing
approximately $1.66 million from registrants and applicants of U.S. trademarks through companies called Trademark Compliance Center (TCC) and Trademark
Compliance Office (TCO).
The USPTO is proud to have cooperated with law enforcement agencies in the
California case.
Trademark
solicitations have been a global problem for decades, including for USPTO
customers, and we have implemented several measures to protect our customers against
them.
First,
the USPTO includes a warning and a link to our Non-USPTO
Solicitations page in each office action, urging our customers to carefully
review all correspondence regarding their application to ensure that they are
responding to an official document from the USPTO rather than a private company
solicitation.
Second,
a similar warning, on bright orange paper, is sent to every registrant when the
USPTO mails the paper registration certificate to the registrant.
Third,
the USPTO has several online resources alerting the public to these non-USPTO solicitations
on our Non-USPTO
Solicitations page, including a frequently updated list of fraudulent
entities we’ve already identified. If you receive an invoice from a company not
appearing on this list, we encourage you to email us copies of the notice and
the envelope it came in at TMFeedback@uspto.gov
so that we may assess whether to add it to the list.
A
registered trademark is a valuable asset, and where there’s money,
unfortunately, there are bound to be criminal elements lurking. The USPTO continues
to provide its ongoing full support to U.S. law enforcement officials working
on this issue.
Read more from the Director's Forum Blog
|
