Some trademark applicants and registrants have paid fees to private
companies while mistakenly thinking they were paying fees required by
the USPTO. To combat this problem, last week, the USPTO co-hosted its
first ever public roundtable on fraudulent solicitations
with the Trademark Public Advisory Committee. The objectives of the
event were to educate the public about the problem of misleading or
fraudulent advertisements for trademark services, to learn more about
what other government agencies were doing, and to brainstorm new ideas
for tackling this complex issue.
The USPTO has worked closely in the past with other federal agencies on
criminal prosecutions for fraudulent trademark solicitations. During the
roundtable, representatives from DOJ and USPIS spoke about the recent
criminal convictions in California of five individuals, including
employees of a bank, who ran a lucrative trademark scam and knowingly
laundered the proceeds. Two have been sentenced and the remaining three
are scheduled for sentencing in August. To learn more about this case
and the USPTO’s role in it, read my blog from December 2016.
To read the entire article, please visit: https://www.uspto.gov/blog/
This article is from USPTO's Director's Forum: A Blog from USPTO's Leadership. This particular blog is written by Commissioner for Trademarks Mary Boney Denison.