When attorney Ana Vinueza checked her mail in mid-July, she saw four cease-and-desist letters from attorneys and businesses claiming her clients’ trademark applications infringed their rights.
But Vinueza isn’t a trademark attorney and has never filed a trademark application. Vinueza ran a search of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s trademark registry for her name as the attorney of record. What she found stunned her: she’d been listed on about 2,500 filings.
Vinueza alerted an IP attorney, who hadn’t heard of this scam before.
“That clued me in that this is not normal,” said Vinueza, a senior attorney at Illumina. ...
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