When a trademark application is filed with the USPTO, the information - including the owner's contact information - becomes public record and easily found online. Unfortunately, several companies mine the public data and send out what are essentially scams to trademark owners. These scams are generally letters from official-sounding entities that are not governments and provide no tangible benefit. Their publications and registries sound official to the unknowing and certainly many victims have sent them checks or credit cards believing it was important or even necessary.

If you have any question as to whether a solicitation is legitimate, contact an attorney. If the request does not say "U.S. Patent and Trademark Office" or "U.S.P.T.O." on it, it is not a part of the trademark application or registration process. To limit contact from these scams, our firm never provides email addresses or phone numbers of our clients when filing with the USPTO.

Here is a list of some of the entities engaged in these practices - none are government agencies and none are required to protect your trademark:

• TMI Trademark Info Corporation, in Texas
• United States Trademark Protection Agency (USTPA), in Seattle, Washington
• Global Edition KFT
• Trademark Renewal Service, in Washington, D.C.
• Globus Edition S.L., in Palma de Mallorca, Spain
• Company for Economic Publications Ltd., in Austria
• Institute of Commerce for Industry, Trade, and Commerce, in Switzerland
• CPI (Company for Publications and Information) Anstalt, in Liechtenstein
• Société pour Publications et Information S.A.R.L., in Vienna, Austria

For more from the International Trademark Association about these scams, see here.

Similarly, domain name WHOIS information is publicly available and domain name scams are becoming increasingly popular. As the owner of apptorney.com domain name, I received an email last week purporting to help me protect my brand name against similar Asian domain names. Anyone who replies to one of these scams is then offered an opportunity to purchase domain names (that they probably have no need for) and is led to believe that if they do not purchase the domains someone else is already signed up to buy them. Yet this scare tactic is merely a scam. If you receive any such email, copy and paste a sentence or two from the email into a search engine and read all about others who have received the scam.

Unfortunately, the public data used for trademark and domain name registration is also used to perform scams.  If you receive one and are unsure what to do or whether it is a scam, contact an attorney for guidance.