Have you received something in the mail purporting to be about your trademark and offering some sort of listing in an international directory or some other catalog of trademarks?
The odds are what you received is a scam. I receive emails and calls from clients every week asking about these scams, which are always tweaking to try to stay ahead of the authorities. They must be working if they continue to operate because for years they've been sending out this mail with official looking documentation and government sounding names, asking people for money related to their trademarks.
What to be on the lookout for, how to avoid these scams, and how to report them.
Any important correspondence should come from your attorney or directly from the US Patent and Trademark Office. The US Patent and Trademark Office uses the domain name uspto.gov, and their address is in Alexandria, Virginia. If you receive something from a government-sounding office in Washington DC, New York, or Philadelphia, all of which I have seen recently in these scams, you can know right away that that is not official correspondence from the USPTO.
If they are asking for money for some sort of
directory or register or equivalent of yellow pages, know that these directories are completely worthless. I've never once in 20 years seen one of these directories in person. I've never once in any conversation with a colleague or anyone from the Patent and Trademark Office ever been asked to look at a directory or refer to one for any official business. They have zero value. And yet they charge hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to participate in this directory listing scam.
Beware of these offers. They use names like Patent and Trademark Institute, Glotrade, International Patent and Trademark Register, World Patent and Trademark Registry. All of these names are not the US Patent and Trademark Office and they are not official.
If you have any questions, contact your attorney. Contact the USPTO. Do a search on the web to try to learn more about it before you send anyone money related to some kind of directory offer. And finally, if you have been taken by one of these scams, I urge you to contact the FTC and the USPTO to notify them, provide them with details, so that hopefully it can help in the crackdown on these scam operators
