Received an invoice at the shop this afternoon from some outfit called TMI (Trade Mark Info) for almost $1500.00 for something called trademark publication services. The bill had two of our trademarks attached – our house design and The Logo Factory itself. Trouble is, I’ve never heard of TMI (our trademark applications are handled by an intellectual property firm in Ottawa) nor did I ever use/request their services. The bill breathlessly tells us that The Logo Factory trademark ‘publication’ is about to lapse (a bad thing I suppose) but if we pay the aforementioned amount all will be just peachy. The TMI invoice looks remarkably similar to an official trademark registration invoice and could quite possibly be mistaken as the real McCoy. Which, methinks, is the point of the entire exercise.
You see, TMI has nothing to do with registering a trademark at all, but rather some funky web domain – trademark-info.net – where for a princely sum, your trademark can be listed in their searchable website database. Which, in case you were wondering, has nothing to do with trademark registration at all, offers no protection for trademark, and other than people who are trying to find out who this outfit is (because they just received a weird bill), won’t expose your nifty TM to anybody.
Publication of all registered trademarks is the USPTO‘s job, and something they do (without additional cost) as part of the trademark registration process. Trademarks are a matter of public record, and available on the USPTO to anyone with an internet connection.
There’s no phone number for the outfit, but a quick WHOIS of the website tells us that it’s registered to some outfit located in Balzers. Where’s Balzers you ask? Why, that’s a village and community located in southern Liechtenstein, not exactly the hub of trademark registration services, or at least not the last time I checked. Nor, I suspect, does the village (population 4,000) house any legitimate US trademark services of any sort.
So why do they bother? I’ll bet a lot of bigger companies who get these official looking things pay ‘em, without a second thought, fearful of losing their trademark completely. The bills make their way into the accounts payable slipstream and the check gets cut during the next run. It’s not a uncommon type of ruse – we receive similar domain transfer invoices, disguised as domain expiry notices, on a regular basis. Luckily, ours is a small shop and any oddball invoices are flagged by our admin Tasha.
We’re not the first to wonder about this outfit (and similar ones), at least according to this feature on the International Trademark Association website. Being going on for some time, if this April dated post fake invoice scams on Bob Pritchett‘s blog is any indication…
Related Posts
