The USPTO recently submitted comments to the FTC regarding its proposed rulemaking, Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses.
The USPTO comments, submitted on December 2, 2022, highlight the wide range of scams that are impacting the trademark system today, and their tremendous impact on all types of trademark operations.
Some quotes from the USPTO comments:
- Specifically, scams involving the impersonation of the USPTO are prevalent, and, as a result, intellectual property owners have suffered significant financial harm as well as the loss of valuable intellectual property rights.
- Scams involving the impersonation of the USPTO are prevalent, affecting tens of thousands of individuals and businesses that own trademarks and causing them financial harm.
- Regarding trademark filing scams, those that involve the impersonation of the USPTO impact thousands of applications and cause losses to mark owners totaling in the tens of millions of dollars.
- As shown in the example reproduced above, the USPTO’s logo, not just its official seal, has been used by bad actors to extort money from USPTO customers.
These comments are some of the most revealing ones ever published by the USPTO regarding the extent of the scams and their impact on the USPTO and users of the USPTO’s filing systems.
USPTO scam comments: FTC-2022-0064-0026_attachment_1 by erik5733 on Scribd
