Fifty dollars a signature.
That’s what one company offered me for putting my name, and my law license, on up to 150 U.S. trademark applications a month. I said no. A few attorneys who get that same offer don’t.
What They Were Actually Asking For
This wasn’t really an offer to hire an attorney. It was an offer to rent one. Click approve, and their system would enter all the application information and file with the USPTO, no real review required beyond that single click. Three to five minutes per case, they told me, and the status updates would take care of themselves too. My name and my license would be the only thing standing between their software and a federal trademark registration, while I’d have no real way of knowing whether these businesses existed or sold anything at all.
Why Would Anyone Take That Deal
The math explains a lot. For years, several Chinese provincial governments offered cash subsidies, in some cases worth several times the USPTO filing fee itself, to anyone who registered a trademark abroad. File a cheap U.S. application, collect a subsidy worth far more than it cost, and that adds up fast if you’re doing it by the hundreds.
Plenty of people took that math seriously. By 2020, one attorney named Jonathan Morton was listed as the representative on 284 separate trademark applications in a single day, about one every five minutes for twenty-four hours straight. That same year he oversaw nearly 22,000 applications total, more than the entire IP Office of Singapore handles in an entire year. Officials had already flagged where this was heading. Back in 2017, Mary Boney Denison, then the USPTO’s Commissioner for Trademarks, warned that filings from China showed a “dramatic increase” that “don’t appear legitimate.” Nobody pulled the brakes.
How Big This Has Actually Gotten
As of early 2025, the federal trademark register held more than 3.3 million active registrations, with nearly 765,000 new applications filed in fiscal year 2024, and some of that volume likely reflects a trend industry observers have flagged for years: large numbers of single-class applications tied to products sold on online marketplaces, where having a registered mark unlocks seller protections like Amazon’s Brand Registry program.
Then the enforcement finally caught up to the warning. In February 2025, the USPTO issued its first ever Show Cause Order, putting more than 42,000 registration decisions tied to a single filing operation on track for potential cancellation, after finding its own examination process had been compromised from the inside. By August, the USPTO had terminated more than 52,000 applications and registrations connected to a single foreign firm that had been forging attorneys’ signatures outright. More than fifty U.S. attorneys have had their names used this way without their knowledge, touching over ten thousand filings.
China appears to have noticed its own problem. In November 2025, three of its own agencies, the IP administration, the Ministry of Public Security, and the market regulator, launched a joint crackdown on the agency industry behind these filings, designating 2026 a “Year of Rectification and Standardization”. Since 2023, China has rejected more than 1.2 million bad-faith trademark applications domestically and is rewriting its own trademark law specifically to target the practice. Both countries are now fighting the same fire, from opposite sides of the world.
The Real Victims: American Businesses and the Customers They Serve
Trademark attorneys aren’t the only ones paying for this. Every one of those junk registrations sits on the federal register exactly like a real one, and a real one is precisely what blocks a legitimate applicant. A trademark examiner comparing two marks looks mainly at how similar the marks are and how related the goods are, and a bad trademark filing sitting on the register often has to be cited against a new applicant in a likelihood of confusion refusal, even when the record was faked, filed by an unqualified intermediary, or never used in U.S. commerce at all.
The harm doesn’t stop at the application stage either. Some of these fraudulent registrations get weaponized directly against real sellers on Amazon, where a registered mark unlocks the tools that prevent counterfeiting and listing hijacking, and bad actors register a name already in use by someone else, then threaten the legitimate seller with removal from the platform unless they pay up. The USPTO has even created a dedicated Register Protection Unit specifically to catch this kind of scheme.
The federal government has started treating this as a safety problem, not just a branding one. In May 2026, the Consumer Product Safety Commission launched a nationwide crackdown specifically targeting counterfeit certification marks used to push dangerous products past U.S. safety requirements, warning that bad actors use fake labels to mislead consumers and move hazardous goods, many originating overseas, including from manufacturers in China, through e-commerce platforms. The agency has already pulled accreditation from testing labs caught falsifying results and has acted against products ranging from lead-leaching faucets to choking-hazard toys. In 2024 alone, the CPSC screened millions of online listings and had more than 53,000 recalled or banned products removed from retail platforms. A counterfeit bicycle helmet sold under a real brand’s name can look identical to the genuine version in a product photo, but it was never tested to the same impact standards, and the customer wearing it has no way of knowing the difference until it matters.
The Professional Cost to Trademark Attorneys
The filing mill keeps the fee. The software keeps the data. The client disappears. The only person left standing in front of the USPTO is the attorney whose signature is on the application.
That’s not rhetorical anymore. In June 2025, the USPTO issued a precedential sanctions order against a firm called Stelcore Management Services for doing exactly this: entering attorney signatures without their knowledge, supplying false signatory information, and routing it all through accounts the attorneys never controlled. The ruling made the consequence permanent. A signature filed with intent to get around the rules can’t be fixed after the fact. There’s no do over once it’s on record. If your name ends up on thousands of applications you never personally reviewed, the fact that you didn’t type the signature yourself won’t carry much weight. The license on the line is yours, not the software platform’s.
What You Can Actually Do About It
If you’re a legitimate applicant and one of these junk registrations is sitting in your way, you’re not stuck. I wrote about this back in 2021 when the Trademark Modernization Act first passed, and the tools haven’t changed. Ex parte expungement is simply a way to ask the USPTO to cancel a registration that was never genuinely used in commerce, no lawsuit required, available starting three years after registration. There’s also a reexamination petition for use based filings, available up to five years after the statement of use was filed. And for fifty dollars, you can file a letter of protest during examination itself, putting evidence in front of the examiner before a bad registration ever issues. None of these require a lawsuit. They just require someone willing to use them. This problem isn’t slowing down, and it’s only getting more sophisticated. If a registration is blocking your brand, or you simply want to make sure your own filings are clean, reach out.
