The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently sounded an alarm about a scheme in which Chinese residents offer to pay U.S. lawyers to use their information in trademark filings, which could constitute the unauthorized practice of law. But in some cases, scammers in China and elsewhere are allegedly using attorneys' signatures in trademark registration filings without permission.

In December, Miriam Paton, a registered Canadian patent agent who also happens to specialize in patent prosecution, filed a declaration with the USPTO after learning that her name and signature had been used in “several hundred trademark applications” in the U.S.

“I do not practice trademark law and have never represented any party in a trademark matter before the USPTO,” wrote Paton. “I have never agreed to serve as a domestic representative for a trademark application before the USPTO and cannot do so because I am a resident of Canada.”

In Washington, D.C., Paton's name appeared on the radar of trademark and copyright attorney Eric Perrott of the Gerben Law Firm while he was investigating the circumstances underlying the USPTO's rejection of a client's trademark application for a mobile app.

The application was rejected because a Chinese company had already filed an application for the same product, according to Perrott. He said he discovered that the company in question had used screenshots of his client's app in the sham application. And then he noticed Paton's signature on the company's trademark paperwork.

“The signature portions of these applications are not easily searchable,” Perrott noted. “So even figuring out who's signing these applications is not easy.”

The number of trademark applications coming out of the Chinese mainland has increased by about 1,100 percent between fiscal years 2013 and 2018, according to the USPTO. The agency has stated that the recent scam involving Chinese residents soliciting U.S. attorneys' information for use in trademark applications “appears to be an attempt to circumvent” a proposed rule to require foreign trademark applicants and registrants to use lawyers licensed in the U.S.

The spike in trademark applications has been connected, at least in part, to a program in which the Chinese government pays companies to register foreign trademarks. Perrott said the payments are about $800, or $525 after deducting filing fees, for each successful trademark registration. 

He called the deluge of trademark applications from China “the biggest challenge the [US]PTO has had in at least the last decade, if not more.”

“It's really showing the cracks in the infrastructure of their system,” he said. “There is a lot of trust that people are going to be filing these in good faith.”

And it's not just the U.S. that is dealing with a deluge of trademark applications from China, according to Ying Luo, patent law attorney and partner at Lung Tin in New York. 

“This trend of an increase of Chinese companies trademark filing is not really unique for the U.S.; I think it's for everywhere,” she said. “Even in China domestically, trademark applications have also increased a lot.”

“It's the booming of the business and people are paying more and more attention to foreign country filings,” she added. 

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