Every stage of a trademark’s life now has a scam built around it. Here is what each one looks like, how the USPTO is responding, and what to do if your application is already caught up in it
A business decides to file a trademark. Someone on the team searches for a familiar online legal-services brand, clicks the first result, and lands on a site with a similar-sounding name, a polished design, five-star reviews, and a low flat fee. The application gets filed. Months later the business learns the “service” was not who they thought it was, the filing was signed by someone with no authority to sign it, and the USPTO has suspended the application along with hundreds or thousands of others from the same shop.
That is happening. On August 6, 2025 the USPTO terminated more than 52,000 applications and registrations tied to one foreign filing firm and its affiliates. In 2026 it has issued more orders covering thousands of additional files. Many of the owners in those files are real businesses that hired the wrong company.
The scams do not stop at filing. They follow a mark through examination, publication, registration, and every renewal, often on letterhead that looks official. This guide walks through them by stage, then covers what to do if you have already been caught.
What are the scams at the filing stage?
Look-alike filing services. These sites are built to be mistaken for a known legal-services company or for the government itself. They buy search ads on the names people are actually typing, use names that echo familiar brands or include “USPTO,” “U.S.,” or “Federal,” and advertise flat fees that look like a bargain. In a February 25, 2026 show-cause order, the USPTO alleged that a group of operators ran websites under names including “USPTO Trademarked,” “USPTO Trademarked Office,” “Trademark Filing USA,” and “USA Patents and Trademarks Offices,” with fake customer reviews built from stock photos, no identified licensed attorney, and invented “fees” and requirements not found in USPTO rules. This order was converted into a final sanctions order on June 11, 2026. The USPTO does not recommend or endorse any filing service or attorney, so any site claiming it does is a red flag on its own.
Unauthorized practice and forged signatures. Only the applicant, someone with legal authority to bind the applicant, or a qualified U.S. attorney may sign a trademark submission, and no one may sign another person’s name. Filing mills routinely ignore this. They type the owner’s name into the signature field, misuse a U.S. attorney’s credentials, or pay a licensed attorney a nominal amount to appear on thousands of filings that attorney never reviewed. The consequence lands on the owner: a filing signed improperly can be stricken.
Fabricated contact information. Some services enter an email address they control as the owner’s correspondence address. That lets them intercept USPTO correspondence and, in some cases, the verification codes that online marketplaces send to brand-registry applicants. The owner never sees the office action, the deadline passes, and the application goes abandoned.
Fake specimens and false addresses. Some filings include digitally altered product photos or screenshots from “specimen farm” websites that show no real use of the mark. Others list a false U.S. address so a foreign applicant can avoid the rule requiring foreign-domiciled applicants to be represented by a U.S.-licensed attorney. Both put the resulting registration at risk.
What are the scams once an application is pending or registered?
Official-looking solicitations. This is the scam most of our clients have already seen. USPTO records are public, so as soon as an application is filed, companies scrape the owner’s name, address, mark, and serial number and mail or email notices that look like government invoices. They carry names that sound official, use eagles, seals, and “United States” in the letterhead, cite the real serial number, and demand payment for:
- “Registration” or “publication” in a private registry or directory that has no legal effect.
- Trademark “monitoring” services at inflated prices.
- Renewal or maintenance filings, often sent years before the actual deadline and priced well above the official fees.
- Decorative registration certificates or plaques.
- Recording the mark with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is a real service but one an owner can handle directly or through counsel.
Some of these offerings are legal but misleading. Others are outright fraud. The USPTO’s own warning notes that deceptive solicitations often look like invoices, use alarming phrases like “important notification” or “cancellation notice,” and include “U.S.” or “United States” in the company name. Official USPTO correspondence comes from the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia, and every official document is posted to the file in the USPTO’s Trademark Status and Document Retrieval (TSDR) system. In the USPTO’s words: “If it’s not in TSDR, it’s not an official communication.”
Impersonation calls, emails, and texts. Fraudsters call from spoofed numbers that show “USPTO” on caller ID, sometimes using the names of real USPTO employees, and say a “missing fee” is holding up the application or that someone else is about to register the same mark. The FTC issued a consumer alert on this on September 9, 2025. Authentic USPTO email comes from addresses ending in “@uspto.gov,” and USPTO employees will never ask for personal or payment information by phone, email, or text, and never by wire transfer, payment app, or gift card.
Spoofed websites. Copies of USPTO.gov and the MyUSPTO login page are used to harvest account credentials and payment information. The official sites are USPTO.gov and my.USPTO.gov, and nothing else.
International-registration and domain-name scams. Owners who extend protection abroad through the Madrid System receive invoices that imitate WIPO. WIPO has warned that it does not demand payment by email, does not accept Bitcoin, handles Madrid fees only in Swiss francs, and does not handle oppositions. A related scam is the “urgent” email from an overseas registrar claiming another company is about to register your brand as a domain name and offering to “protect” it for a fee.
Which companies has the USPTO named in its orders?
Final sanctions orders: Swift Brand Mark, LLC, which also operated as “USPTO Trademarked,” “USPTO Trademarked Office,” “Brandmark Masters,” “TradeMark FilingPro,” “Trademark Filing USA,” and “USA Patents and Trademarks Offices” (June 11, 2026); Shenzhen Huanyee Intellectual Property Co., Ltd. and Yusha Zhang (April 16, 2026, and an earlier order in 2021); Shenzhen Seller Growth Network Tech. Co., Ltd. and affiliates (August 6, 2025); Stelcore Management Services, LLC and Stelcore Management Services Pvt., Ltd. (June 13, 2025); and Abtach, Ltd., 360 Digital Marketing LLC, and Retrocube LLC, along with the related brands Logo Orb and Olive Logo (January 25, 2022).
Show-cause orders (allegations, not final findings): Trademark Counter, Apex Trademark, Trademark Centric, and Trademark Bolt (September 17, 2025); Deputy Trademark (March 26, 2026); and Jerome Eady, Jr. (January 17, 2023).
These are only the operations that have been publicly named. Many look-alike services have not been named in any order, so a company’s absence from this list doesn’t mean it’s legitimate.
How is the USPTO responding, and why does that matter to legitimate owners?
The USPTO now uses an administrative sanctions process against filing operations. When it issues a show-cause order, the affected applications are typically suspended while the order is resolved, and the USPTO can ultimately strike the improper submissions, terminate the pending applications, and reopen or cancel registrations that resulted from them. The August 2025 final order covered more than 52,000 applications and registrations from one firm. The February 2026 show-cause order listed more than 1,600 applications filed in the names of thousands of different owners. In the six months before May 2026, the Office issued 11 more orders aimed at about 10,500 additional records.
The sanction reaches the filing, not just the filer. A legitimate business whose application was submitted by a sanctioned operation can lose that application, and its filing date, even though the business did nothing wrong except choose the wrong vendor.
What should I do if my application is caught in a scam or a sanctions order?
Move quickly. These orders come with short response windows. The February 2026 order gave affected owners until March 27, 2026.
- Check TSDR for every application and registration you own. Look at the attorney of record, the correspondence email address, the signatory, the specimen, and whether a sanctions order or suspension notice appears in the file.
- Retake control of the file. Appoint qualified U.S. counsel and correct the correspondence address so official notices reach you.
- Decide whether to respond to the order. If your particular filing was properly signed and accurate, a petition to the Director with evidence may preserve it. If it was not, and with a filing mill it usually was not, the better course is often a new, properly prepared application, which means a new filing date. Check whether anyone else filed in the gap.
- Look past the one application. Confirm whether the scam service filed anything else in your name, whether any declarations of use were inaccurate, and whether marketplace brand-registry accounts were tied to an email address you do not control.
- Report it. Scams can be reported to the USPTO at TMScams@uspto.gov and to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
For everyone else: verify before you pay. Check TSDR, call the Trademark Assistance Center at 1-800-786-9199 if something looks official, and run any unexpected invoice past counsel before anyone on the team pays it.
Working with counsel on a trademark that has been compromised
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
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