Scams warning
Registration and renewal fees scams
Scammers use information from filing an application, advertisement of acceptance and registration or an upcoming renewal deadline to ask for ‘payment of fees’ or for you to ‘sign and return’ the notice to ‘confirm you want to renew’.
Emails advising that a third party wants to register your trademark as a domain name (usually in China), but you can prevent them are also common.
These scams often appear official and genuine. They may state your signature or fees are required for publication, acceptance, registration or renewal of your trade mark or patent. Some look like a letter or notice, others look like an invoice or reminder invoice. We recommend ignoring them all. WADESON attends to all fee payment on your behalf.
If you want to reserve your domain name in China or elsewhere, register it through a reputable domain registration service and ignore emails that claim you need to lodge an objection. Registration of domain names is, broadly speaking, on a first-come, first-served basis.
On rare occasions, official communications from a genuine Patent or Trade Marks Office can be misdirected to you instead of to us. Please send us any correspondence you receive regarding your intellectual property applications and registrations (if the sender is not on the list below). We will not charge you to check a ‘scam’ request for payment.
Known scam organisations
- Commercial Centre for Industry and Trade (based in Switzerland)
- Company for Economic Publications Ltd (based in Austria)
- Company for Publications and Information Anstalt (based in Liechtenstein)
- Edition The Marks KFT
- European Institute for Economy and Commerce – EIEC (based in Belgium)
- Federated Institute for Patent and Trademark Registry (based in Florida, USA)
- Gaia Almanach LTD
- Globus Edition SL (based in Spain)
- I.B.F.T.P.R – International Bureau for Federated Trademarks and Patent Register
- INFOCOM (based in Switzerland)
- Institute of Commerce, Trade and Commerce (based in Switzerland)
- International Patent and Trademark Register (based in Nürnberg, Germany)
- IP Data s.r.o. (based in the Czech Republic)
- IPT-Register (IPT Registration s.r.o., based in the Czech Republic)
- IPTD – International Patents & Trademarks Database
- IPTO – International Patent & Trademark Organization
- IT & T AG (based in Switzerland)
- ODM (Patent Trademark Register)
- Patent & Trademark Organisation LLC (based in Latvia or the US, but with a street address in Melbourne)
- RIPT – Register of International Patents and Trade Marks
- Search Index Registration Department – Registration of International Patent
- TM Collection (based in Hungary)
- TM-Edition Ltd (based in Hungary)
- TMP, Trade Mark Publishers (based in Austria, but with a street address in Sydney)
- WDTP – Worldwide Database of Trademarks and Patents (based in the Czech Republic)
- WIPD (World Intellectual Property Database)
- WIPO (note – this is not the genuine WIPO, but World Intelligent Property Office using a misleadingly similar letterhead and contact details)
- WIPT s.r.o. (based in the Czech Republic)
- WOTRA (World Organization for Trademarks, based in Hungary)
- ZDR-Datenregister GmbH (based in Germany)