Trademark Renewal and Maintenance Scams
Why solicitations cluster around year five, and how to tell a real deadline from an invented one.
Maintenance deadlines are where trademark owners lose registrations, and where solicitations are most effective. The reason is simple: the deadlines are real, they are genuinely easy to miss, and the consequence of missing them is losing the registration entirely.
The deadlines that actually exist
A US registration requires a declaration of continued use between the fifth and sixth anniversary of registration, another between the ninth and tenth, and a renewal every ten years after that. Grace periods exist but cost extra. Miss them and the registration is cancelled — not suspended, cancelled.
Why year five matters most
Our own index shows the effect clearly. Of trademarks filed in 2018, roughly four in ten are no longer live. Of those filed in 2017, more than six in ten. The jump between those two cohorts is the first maintenance deadline arriving: a large share of owners simply never file the declaration. Solicitations are timed to land exactly there, because that is when a real deadline makes a fake invoice believable.
What a real reminder looks like
The USPTO does send courtesy email reminders, from a uspto.gov address, and they direct you to file through the official system. They do not invoice you through a third party, and they do not ask for payment to a private company. Any fee you genuinely owe is payable to the USPTO directly.
The safest habit
Diary your own deadlines from the registration date rather than waiting to be told. If a notice arrives, verify it against TSDR before acting on it — and note that a legitimate deadline being real does not make the sender legitimate.
What the register actually shows
Share of applications from each year that are no longer live, from our index of the federal register:
| Filed 2015 | 74% no longer live 271,872 of 367,525 |
|---|---|
| Filed 2016 | 71% no longer live 275,109 of 388,459 |
| Filed 2017 | 70% no longer live 305,609 of 438,269 |
| Filed 2018 | 66% no longer live 302,623 of 456,553 |
| Filed 2019 | 50% no longer live 241,371 of 482,137 |
| Filed 2020 | 35% no longer live 225,658 of 648,982 |
The jump between the older and newer cohorts is the first maintenance deadline arriving. Solicitations are timed to land there for exactly that reason.
Quick checks
- Is the deadline the notice cites the same as the one shown in TSDR?
- Is payment going to the USPTO, or to the company that wrote to you?
- Are you being charged a "service fee" on top of the official fee?
- Did you ask this company to represent you?
Official sources
- USPTO TSDR — check your real status and deadlines
- USPTO: Caution on misleading notices
- USPTO: official fee schedule
Why we do not name companies
These pages describe patterns, not businesses. Some senders of these solicitations are outright fraudulent; others are technically legal private services whose marketing is merely misleading. Telling them apart requires evidence we do not have, and calling a named company a scam is a statement of fact about an identifiable business.
Recognising the pattern protects you just as well. Where a specific operator matters, the USPTO publishes examples of misleading notices and its own sanction decisions — USPTO: Caution on misleading notices.