Extortion on the Patent Office. Watch out for fraudsters!

Extortion on the Patent Office are a real plague. The practice is not new and has been going on for quite a few years. Unfortunately, it is growing. Today, almost every entrepreneur who registers its trademark may receive a letter from the fraudsters. How to protect against it?

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Extortion on the Patent Office – be alert

Some time ago a client called me. I helped her to register a trademark at the territory of the European Union. She said she has already received from me all the documents and she will surely fit within the prescribed period of 14 days. She mentioned with satisfaction that she will get 30% of discount on the official fee.

I felt hot flashes, and I thought.

What discount?
But OHIM uses a fixed fee for protection.
The client probably received a a letter from the fraudsters.
Have I warned her about a threat?
And if I forget?

Full of anxiety I asked: Have you already made a transfer?

Client: Not yet, but with a cup of coffee in hand, I just sit down to do it.

It was a load of my heart. The client was a few clicks away from a loss of nearly 1 thousand. Euro.

It turned out that exactly the same day, she received a letter from our Patent Agency and from the fraudsters. Her secretary clipped all the documents together and put them on the desk of Mrs. director. It was a classical extortion on the Patent Office.

So I told her how the whole system works.

Watch out for misleading offers!

I recommend you to visit the website of the Office for the Harmonization in the Internal Market in Alicante in Spain. OHIM clearly warns there against such practices.

Extortion on the Patent Office - OHIM

As WIPO…

Extortion on the Patent Office - WIPO

Everything is based on the inattention of the entrepreneurs, and looks like this:

You filed in national, community (OHIM) or international (WIPO) procedure a trademark or utility design. You read about official fees. So you expect to get an information about the requirement to pay a fee.

And suddenly comes to you a letter, official-looking document which calls you to the:

“fee for publication of a trademark”

You are briefly reading:

– It concerns a trademark filed in OHIM, WIPO or in national Patent Office
– The correct name of your trademark was indicated
– The filing date was indicated
– The filing number was indicated
– The name of a representative was indicated (if you use his services)

On the back of the page is written, in small letters, a regulation. Of course, hardly anyone reads it.

About extortion on the Patent Office, wrote WIPO on the website:

Where’s the catch?

What you consider an official letter is in fact an ordinary commercial offer from a private company.

In the unfortunate regulations you will read that fees are charged for ”publishing information about the notification” in a private database.

Database, which is usually unknown to anyone.

Entrepreneurs pay being firmly convinced that they pay a fee for the protection.

In order to avoid the charge of misleading people, a company mentions in several places within the text, that they are not the Patent Office. So there is no formal reason to talk about fraudulent on the extortion on the Patent Office.

Of course, the whole concept and the layout of the letter reminds an official document.

A mistake is easy.

– to the left the official logo of WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) in the middle and in the right the logo from misleading letters.

Unfortunately the extortion on the Patent Office are cost effective and the phenomenon is global!

This is indicated by the warnings published on the websites of the Patent Offices from other countries (see: Austria, Australia, Germany, France or United Kingdom).

Fraudsters can see that the problem begins to be known. For this reason, they go a step further. In one of the letters, they warned about misleading letters. Of course they emphasize that only they have the right to collect the money, and this is why they are writing.… 🙂

If an entrepreneur acted by the Patent Agency, than it’s name is mentioned in the letter.

This proves that the dirty business must be profitable. There are the new companies which send such letters and new patterns of letters.

Below I present the ones which were send to my clients.

I will be successfully completing the list.

So I request you.

If you received such letter, please send it’s scan to my address:

mikolaj@lech.bydgoszcz.pl

When I remove your data, I will publish this document on my blog. This will allow to warn another entrepreneurs from the danger of confusion.

Letter 1