about abusive or fraudulent business practices. Individual complaints aren\u2019t resolved by the agency, but the FTC can institute investigations into business practices if the agency receives enough complaints on a certain matter. Also, business owners can register complaints about trademark service scams with their state\u2019s consumer protection agency or authority. The USPTO claims that many states have mechanisms in place to conduct investigative activities into deceptive business practices which target residents of the state.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office\u2019s official website warns trademark owners about private companies who conduct trademark scams. These schemes involve companies, many of which use names intended to confuse people into an association with the USPTO, who make offers for legal services, trademark monitoring services, recording trademarks with U.S. Customs and Border Protection or registering the trademarks in a private registry. On its warning page, the USPTO maintains a list of a couple dozen such companies whose scamming activities are known.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11764,"featured_media":74699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5519,845,228,3,191,6612,41],"tags":[449,8757,247,12,62,2309,8727,8759,1634],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74697"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11764"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74697"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=74697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}