- 27 januari 2023
- Posted by: Pieter Van der Hulst
- Categorie: Fraude

It seems there’s yet another round of phishing and related misleading invoice scam in the area of intellectual property rights (IPR)
This is an old-fashioned but still very lucrative crime. Taking advantage of the by-design transparency of related data, this scam deceives IPRs rights owners, a minimum of a third of a million a year, during the trade mark, patent or design registration process, wherever they are located.
However, what they now are trying to do is also contacting non IPR rights owners ! See the below example of what we received:
To achieve their goal, the Legal Business Structures mimic the activities of the official IP offices, using names and logos that look and/or sound like genuine offices. These fraudsters often succeed in staying under the judicial authority’s radar when defrauding their victims of hundreds or thousands of euros, knowing that these ‘small’ fees would be difficult to identify or too expensive to investigate on a local or regional level.
Some advice on how to detect the scam:
- this domain has been registered very recently
This is typical ! Legitimate business normally exists already longtime, and not just some months. - If in doubt, check this searchable list of the firms or registers that users have complained of as having sent misleading invoices (along with copies of the actual invoices)
Misleading invoices (europa.eu) – https://euipo.europa.eu/ohimportal/en/misleading-invoices/ - If it contains URL’s, you could first of all check URLSCAN.IO to see how it looks & behaves, without actually going to that site !
URL and website scanner – urlscan.io >> https://urlscan.io/