Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, designs, info-tech and confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. Read, post comments and participate!

The team is Eleonora Rosati, Annsley Merelle Ward and Merpel. E-mail the Kats here!

The team is joined by GuestKats Kevin Bercimuelle-Chamot, Jocelyn Bosse, Alessandro Cerri, Anastasiia Kyrylenko, Marcel Pemsel and Anna Maria Stein.

SpecialKats: Verónica Rodríguez Arguijo (TechieKat), Antonios Baris (Book Review Editor), Rose Hughes (PatKat) and Chijioke Okorie (Africa Correspondent).

InternKats: Asude Sena Moya and Söğüt Atilla.
Home / Jeremy Phillips / scams / Renewal scams and useless registers: can you help?

Renewal scams and useless registers: can you help?

- ,
Many a children's tale ends thrillingly when the Knight in Shining Armour comes to rescue the Damsel in Distress -- but it doesn't often happen that the Knight who is riding to the rescue is the Damsel herself. This is however the case here, where the Knight is one Kirsteen Knight -- and she is in urgent need of our help and support. Kirsteen is putting together a feature on scammers who send out misleading and official-looking missives to trade mark and patent owners, luring them into paying handsome sums of money for the privilege of renewing their rights or for listings in commercially valueless registers and directories. This programme will be going out on this Kat's beloved BBC Radio 5 this coming Sunday.

Kirsteen, who has done a lot of work on this subject, has no clear notion of how many victims have fallen for these scams. Nor indeed has this Kat -- but he believes that many people, and indeed some substantial businesses, have done so.

If you have any clue about the scale of these operations, can you please email Kirsteen at kirsteen.knight@bbc.co.uk or phone her at 5 Live Investigates on +44 20 8752 7774 as soon as possible and let her know.  Time really is of the essence.  Please forward this post to anyone you think may be able to help.
Renewal scams and useless registers: can you help? Renewal scams and useless registers: can you help? Reviewed by Jeremy on Thursday, February 16, 2012 Rating: 5

5 comments:

  1. AnonymousFriday, 17 February 2012 at 08:41:00 GMT

    Any idea what time this will be on?

    Steph

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousFriday, 17 February 2012 at 08:56:00 GMT

    They usually charge about £1,000 and must cost £1-2 each to produce and post so hit rate must be at least one in a few hundred or they wouldn't still be here.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AaronFriday, 17 February 2012 at 09:27:00 GMT

    Exactly. We get 2-3 clients a day call us to check on these as well as Hong Kong Domain Registry quesries..

    There wouldn't be so many if it didnt pay.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Almost EmeritusFriday, 17 February 2012 at 09:45:00 GMT

    The UKIPO web site customer feedback pages have what must by now be hundreds of complaints about this: see for example

    http://www.ipo.gov.uk/about/feedback/feedback-previous/feedback-previous-2011q3/feedback-2011q3-gen.htm

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hans SachsSaturday, 18 February 2012 at 16:04:00 GMT

    Don't forget about the domain name scare scams from China.

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Subscribe to: Post Comments ( Atom )
Powered by Blogger.