Some of our clients have received invoices and “important notifications” from companies offering to monitor or renew their trademarks and/or record their trademark registrations with US Customs & Border Protection (USCBP).
One invoice, from Glotrade s.r.o., offers a “similarity service that protects your trademark from copyright infringement” for one year for the price of $2,890. This incomprehensible sentence, which confuses copyright and trademark, is in the same tiny print as the statement that the document is not an invoice.
The large print shows your trademark, your trademark registration number, your date of registration, the classes your mark is registered in, your Glotrade username, and the amount due. The detachable stub says “Please make checks payable to Glotrade s.r.o.”
Unless you carefully review the fine print, you’re likely to think this is a legitimate notice and that you must pay the required fee to keep your trademark registration in effect. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
If you receive any communication about your trademark registration other than from this firm (or another firm that actually assisted in registering your mark), it should be ignored unless you are the party listed as the correspondent with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
In this latter situation, you should respond only to actual Trademark Office notifications, but it can sometimes be hard to tell the scam communications from the real thing.
The following guidelines will help you determine whether the correspondence is legitimate:
The USPTO never sends bills or invoices.
Read the fine print. Scam correspondence often includes a disclaimer indicating that it was sent by a “private business” or that the company is not affiliated with or endorsed by the USPTO.
The USPTO is located in Alexandria, Virginia, so if the correspondence you receive is from somewhere else, it is not legitimate.
The USPTO now provides courtesy reminders of some maintenance requirements, but you will receive these only if you have authorized e-mail communications from the USPTO in one of your prior filings and only if you are the party listed as the correspondent.
All legitimate USPTO emails will come from the domain @uspto.gov. Keep in mind, however, that scammers can make it appears as though their emails are from @uspto.gov even if they aren’t.
The problem of trademark scams has become so pervasive that the Trademark Office actually has an alert on its website listing known scams.
Please feel free to contact us if you receive a suspicious letter or notice of any kind and need help determining whether it’s a scam.
