Following on from last month’s article providing guidance as to how licensed corporations should react upon becoming aware that their corporate name brand is subject to impersonation scams, we have teamed up with our Intellectual Property (IP) Department in helping our clients adopt a more proactive approach to protecting both themselves and their clients against ongoing and increasing impersonation scams.
Our IP team has also noticed a growing trend of infringing companies being incorporated in Hong Kong using names of financial institutions, some of which have real operations in or outside of Hong Kong. As a licensed entity, you would no doubt fully understand the implications involved when such issues arise, which does not only affect business operations and client’s trust and confidence, but also necessitate significant time and resources to deal with regulatory bodies and law enforcements, as well as to restore client’s trust and confidence.
For many financial institutions, their corporate identity (including company name, brand name and trade marks) are among their most valuable assets. Unfortunately, this also means that bad actors often try to ‘steal away’ consumer confidence by filing bad faith applications for trademarks, company names, and domain names to deceive or defraud the public.
To combat this issue, our IP colleagues are pleased to introduce their IP Watch package to monitor and protect your company name, trademarks and domain names. The full IP Watch service includes:
- Monthly or quarterly reports of trademark applications, newly incorporated companies, and/or company name changes to identify potential IP infringement and bad faith filings in Hong Kong and Mainland China;
- Monthly or quarterly reports of new domain name registrations for specified top-level domains to identify domain name squatters;
- Advice and assistance on various types of legal and administrative actions against targeted infringers (such as cease and desist letters, administrative complaints, etc.); and
- Monitoring the results of actions taken so that you can ensure your resources are being deployed efficiently and effectively.
Our IP Watch service can ensure that problems are identified and dealt with promptly and effectively, as some of the most cost-effective and straightforward ways of tackling infringement issues have a strict and short time limit.
If you are interested in our IP Watch service, please contact our IP colleagues at contact ipcollab@deacons.com.
