Trademark solicitation scams

What it is

A business files a trademark. Within days or weeks, a letter or email arrives that looks like it came from the government: a heading with “Patent” and “Trademark” in it, the mark’s exact name and serial number, a deadline, and a sum due. The sender is a private company. The government does not send it, and often the service it describes is not needed, is overpriced, or is never delivered at all.

The mechanism depends on one fact: trademark filings are public. Anyone can build a list of people who just paid to register a mark. The USPTO itself notes that these notices often resemble invoices, cite public records and put “U.S.” or “United States” in the sender’s name.

Some solicitations are only misleading. The ones on this page are the ones prosecutors treated as crimes: a Latvian national who sent fake renewal notices to more than 2,900 registrants, two Californians who sold a monitoring service that never monitored, and three defendants in Munich convicted over “European IP Register” invoices.

How it actually works

1. A list built from public records

   A mailing list is compiled from public trademark databases: the owner’s name, address, the mark and often its status. Nothing is hacked, because the register is designed to be searched.

2. A name borrowed from the real office

   The sender registers a company, or several, with a name that echoes the real agency: “Patent and Trademark Office, LLC”, “Trademark Compliance Center” or “European IP Register”. A prestigious-looking address, in some documented cases a virtual office, sits on the letterhead.

3. The letter

   The letter cites the owner’s real mark and states a deadline and a “total due”. In one documented case the deadline was September 15, 2021 for a registration that was not due until 2024. In another, the note that it was only a proposal appeared in print too small to read.

4. The payment

   The owner pays a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, often by cheque or bank transfer to the address on the letter. A documented victim sent $1,850; the monitoring service in the second case cost $385.

   Where it could have stopped

   The real deadline is one lookup away: the owner’s own record in the USPTO’s status system (or the EUIPO’s register) shows every actual due date and every official document. If the letter’s deadline or fee is not there, it is not from the office.

5. Nothing, or almost nothing, is delivered

   The “renewal” the company had no authority to perform never happens, or the monitoring and customs recording promised for $385 is never done. The owner may not find out until the real deadline nears.

6. The cash is moved on

   Payments land in bank accounts. In the Californian case, prosecutors described accounts opened using other people’s identities to launder the proceeds. In the South Carolina case, investigators later found almost $2.3 million in accounts and $1.28 million in uncashed cheques.

7. Enforcement arrives, sometimes

   The trademark office lists complaints, and a few operators are prosecuted. The Latvian operator ran for about three years before conviction; the Munich scheme was reported to prosecutors in December 2020 and produced convictions in September 2024.

Why it works

The recipient just did something official. A fresh filing makes people expect paperwork, so a letter about a “requirement” feels routine rather than suspicious.

The stakes feel real. Losing a registration is a genuine fear, and a deadline turns a small fee into an easy decision.

The details are correct. The mark’s name, filing date and owner address all match, because they came from the official record. Accuracy passes for authenticity.

The price is low. $385 or even $1,850 is small for a business, well below the effort of investigating it.

And the disclaimers are technically present. As the Munich case shows, the “this is an offer” wording can exist in the letter, just not where anyone will read it.

Where it comes from

Mostly commercial mailings, with operators in the countries the cases document.

The US cases involved a defendant abroad and one at home. One was a Latvian citizen prosecuted in South Carolina; the other two named defendants in the monitoring case were Californians.

Europe has its own version. The EU’s intellectual property office has published a database of misleading payment requests, and Munich’s 2024 convictions followed a 2017 Swedish one, according to the EUIPO.

The UK reports the same pressure. The trade mark attorneys’ body CITMA cited a 63% increase in unsolicited payment requests reported by the UK IPO.

Phone and text impersonation is a newer branch. In September 2025 the FTC warned about calls, texts and emails using spoofed caller ID and real USPTO employee names.

Real cases

Red flags

• A “bureau”, “register” or “compliance” name that sounds like the real office but is a private company.
• A deadline that does not match your own record in the official status system.
• A fee for something the government does not charge for, such as “publication”, “monitoring” or “registration” from an unknown sender.
• A return address that is not Alexandria, Virginia (zip 22313), or an email that is not @uspto.gov.
• Payment by wire, payment app or gift card, or a request for payment by phone, text or email.
• “Total due” and bank details in the body, with the fact that it is only an offer buried in small print.
• Pressure to pay before you have talked to anyone, especially before your attorney has seen it.

If it’s happening to you

Do not pay a notice until you have checked your own record in the official status system.

1. Look up your mark yourself. Use the USPTO’s TSDR (or the EUIPO’s register) and read the actual maintenance dates and documents.
2. Compare the sender with the official examples. The USPTO publishes a list of solicitations it has received complaints about, and EUIPO publishes a searchable database.
3. Send it to your attorney. A licensed trademark attorney can tell a real notice from a solicitation in moments.
4. If you paid, dispute the charge. Contact your bank or card issuer, and keep the letter, envelope and receipt.
5. Report it. Email the notice to [email protected], file at reportfraud.ftc.gov and ic3.gov, and report mailed notices to the Postal Inspection Service. See where to report for other countries.
6. Tell the EUIPO if your notice concerned an EU trade mark; it collects these to support prosecutions.

Where the money goes

Into ordinary bank accounts, usually under company names designed to look official.

In the Californian case, prosecutors said the operators used other people’s identities to open virtual offices and bank accounts, so the letterhead’s Washington address led nowhere. In the South Carolina case, investigators found almost $2.3 million in accounts and $1.28 million in cheques that were never cashed. Recoveries after conviction are ordered as restitution or confiscation: more than $4.5 million was ordered in South Carolina, and about €200,000 was ordered confiscated in Munich, but the amount actually returned to victims is not stated in the sources read for this page.

By the numbers

No published dataset breaks this scheme out as its own category yet, so there is no chart to show. The data page explains which agency categories exist and why some schemes are invisible in official statistics.