Scams in intellectual property
type of fraud
Scams in intellectual property include scams in which inventors and other rights holders are lured to pay money for an apparently official registration of their intellectual property, or for professional development and promotion of their ideas, but do not receive the expected services.
Intellectual property (IP) is a complex field and covers a vast range of subjects. As a result, there are opportunities for individuals and organizations to take unlawful advantage of those wishing to secure protection for their IP.
Registration services
Registration services are organizations or individuals that contact IP applicants or owners and request payment for an apparently official registration of their IP.
Many applicants for and owners of patents, trademarks and industrial design rights receive letters from such registration services and different IP offices and organizations around the world regularly issue warnings in connection with the offered services.
The registration services target applicants directly because patent, trademark and design applications are published a set time after filing or upon grant along with freely available information about a name and address for the applicant. Registration services use this information to send unlawful requests for payment to applicants shortly after publication. The documents are confusing as they appear to be from official governmental agencies and to be legitimate invoices.
A scam increasing in frequency, as of October 2011, is an email originating from a domain name registrar or IT consulting company based in China that purports to notify a trademark holder that another entity is seeking to register the client's trademark or business name as a domain name in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or other Asian countries. The email gives the brand owner a short period in time in which to secure the domain name for their own. These notifications are essentially solicitations. Generally, in the event there really is a third-party who is seeking to register your brand name for nefarious purposes, there are channels available for addressing such uses if and when they materialize.
The public source identifies “Scams in intellectual property” as type of fraud. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Scams, intellectual and property.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7429880. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scams in intellectual property” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.