THE NEWSLETTER | 04.08.26 | V06N09
Co-Founder/Content: Doug Fodeman | Co-Founder/Creative: David Deutsch | Scambaiter: Rob M
Scam Targets Small Business Owners Across the US!
We’ve been waist deep investigating lots of questionable, suspicious and outright fraudulent businesses disguised as trademark representatives and attorneys again. It has been exhausting as we’ve discovered the whack-A-mole nature of this fraud. What is most disconcerting about this type of fraud is that it heavily targets small business owners across the US. Often, it is these small business owners that are easily intimidated when they are falsely told that their business name is likely going to be trademarked by someone else. Many are then tricked into responding to the email and asking the supposed trademark attorney about acquiring the trademark first to protect their business. We spoke to one woman who ran a Texas business for over 30 years. In 2024, she received one of these emails telling her that someone else had inquired with the attorney about registering a trademark for the business name she had been using. To protect her business she asked this attorney for help to trademark the name first. Her initial cost that began as a ridiculously low $49 “trademark package” cost,exploded into nearly $7,000 over the next 15 months! Continue reading and we’ll show you how this manipulation works and why so many of these companies and attorneys are suspicious or likely a fraud.
On March 27, Scambaiter Rob got an email from a longtime friend of his who has owned an online story-telling platform and domain name since 1993. This woman was asking Rob if the email (shown below) was likely a fraud or something she should take seriously. Fortunately, Rob knows a thing or two about fraud! He told her this was a scam, and to ignore it. Please read this email from Intellectual Property Attorney Michael Cohen carefully. (Thousands of nearly identical bogus emails are sent out annually to businesses by fraudsters or questionable businesses making this false claim.) Attorney Cohen’s trademark business is called Nex Mark IP, using nexmarkip[.]com. Taken at face value, it strikes us as extremely unethical for an Attorney to be approached by someone with questions about registering a trademark, but then the Attorney turns to another potential client and essentially says “you had better register it or else you’re going to lose it.” This feels like a fabricated “strong-arm” manipulative business tactic, at best.
In our opinion, Attorney Michael Cohen also loses credibility because his domain, nexmarkip[.]com, was registered through a proxy service on February 14, 2026, just 6 weeks before contacting this business owner. (Also, Gridinsoft finds this domain to be suspicious as well.) This woman was not the only person approached in this way. Check out this Reddit post, as another example. Here are some of the reasons why we believe Nex Mark IP and Attorney Michael Cohen are a fraud….
- On their About Us webpage, they state “Our meticulous attention to detail in every application ensures long-term brand stability for over 100,000 clients who have successfully registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office.” This is quite a claim considering that their business domain is now just 7 weeks old! Also, according to a Google search on April 5, this exact sentence can be found on two other trademark business websites, SwiftBrandMark.com and Alphatrademarks.com (NOTE: On April 4 we tried multiple times to visit swiftbrandmark.com but their website would not display. Also, Scam-Detector finds alphatrademarks.com as questionable and not recommended.)
2. The Nexmarkip.com About Us webpage includes several Testimonials from happy clients. One quote comes from Ethan Jones, CEO of Vision Heights. Using both Google and LinkedIn, we cannot find a business named Vision Heights that has, or had, a CEO named Ethan Jones. But on April 3, Google found this exact same quote from Ethan Jones, with only the name of the business changed in the quote, on 11 other trademark businesses! The other websites on which Google said this quote had been found are SwiftBrandMark.com, TradeMarkSterling[.]com, eTrademarkfiling.com, MyTrademarkZone.com, TrademarkNCO.com, USTrademarkOfficial.com, AlphaTrademarks.com, TMAssistanceOffice.com, USPatentAssistance.com, PinnacleIPMarks.com, and LegalZoomTrademarks.com. (Click to enlarge the screenshot below.)
The above results, of course, led us to dig into some of these other businesses and we found lots of warning signs suggesting fraud or “proceed with caution!” For example, PinnacleIPMarks.com has an identical website to NexMarkIP.com, including listing their address as 321 S Broadway Los Angeles, CA 90013 and phone number as (213) 328-3053. (Scam-Detector scores PinnacleIPMarks.com as suspicious/unsafe/doubtful. This is the same score as NexMarkIP.com) Also, we discovered that the domain pinnicleipmarks.com was registered just 4 days before we found their website! It was registered on March 24, 2026. And when we investigated NexMarkIP.com, we came across another trademark business using the domain NexMarkIP[.]ca (“.ca” = Canada) This Canadian registered website is listed as malicious on VirusTotal.com! According to VirusTotal.com, trademarksterling[.]com is also malicious. This domain was registered less than 5 months ago on 12/10/2025 in Iceland using Namecheap. As of April 4, the domain doesn’t appear to have a website displayed anymore.
Another example of a highly suspicious business that turned up on our search was etrademarkfiling.com. This trademark business was registered on 8/19/2024, nearly 20 months ago. This age should bring it some credibility, especially since VirusTotal doesn’t find it a threat or suspicious. However, as we mentioned, they also include the identical quote from Ethan Jones, CEO of Vision Heights. Their website provides two addresses for the eTradmark Filing business. The first is 9 West James Lane Bethesda Maryland 20814. However, Google informs us that there is no street called West James Lane in Bethesda! The second address shown is 89 Thompson Drive Tracy, CA 95376. Again, according to Google, there is no Thompson Drive in Tracy, CA. (Their About Us page includes testimonials that we have found on other suspicious trademark business websites, such as Richard Smith, Manager at Prism and Melissa Keith, CEO of Denver Skyline.) It is important to note that the etrademarkfiling.com website says they have 300+ Five-Star Reviews and are Recognized by 10+ Leading Publications. But they don’t list or link to any of these reviews or publications. On April 4, we found 1 very confusing review of this business on Trustpilot.com. It’s confusing because the 1 review is a glowing 5-stars and yet Trustpilot, overall, shows that this business is rated at 3.7 stars.
We have personally spoken to two business owners in the US who have become victims to this type of fraud. We mentioned the woman at the top of this article who paid nearly $7000 for a trademark filing that she alleges was filed in a fraudulent manner and for which she was charged unfairly. We also spoke to a physician who told us that he worked with a law firm and the trademark businesses found at trademarkguardianpro.com and trademarkregistrationsexperts.com. (Both of these websites are on our list of highly suspicious companies in our feature article on this topic.) This physician told us that these businesses illegally charged him more than $53,000. He added that he has contacted both the police and FBI about these businesses and the people representing them. We also learned, through a legitimate trademark firm, of another victim who paid nearly $1200 to file a trademark but the victim alleges that his trademark was filed incorrectly, so that his trademark application applies to only one class of trademark registration instead of the three classes he paid for.
Another one of these other highly suspicious trademark companies is called “Trademark Winners” found at the domain trademarkwinners.com. We find Trademark Winners to be suspicious and possibly a scam website for several reasons….
- The trademarkwinners.com website shows their address as 1043 Garland Ave, San Jose, CA 95126-3159. We used Google to visit this address and it shows that there are 3 units located there, A, B and C. None of these Units shows a business name called Trademark Winners. Also, we called one of these businesses at this location and spoke with a woman from Express Copy & More (in Unit C). The woman said that they rent mailboxes to other people and businesses for use. She told us that they do not rent a mailbox to a business called Trademark Winners and has never heard of them.
- The city of San Jose, California has a public database that shows what businesses are registered with the city of San Jose. It can be found online at sanjoseca.gov. When we searched this database for Trademark Winners, this San Jose government website said “no business found.”
- On the Trademarkwinners.com website, they state “We have been providing assistance to our clients for more than 20 years, and we have maintained a 100% satisfaction score.” (Oddly, in two other locations on their top page they say they “have more than 10 years experience” and “has 10 years of experience.” And yet, the domain trademarkwinners.com was registered just over 3 years ago on January 13, 2023.
- On the Trademarkwinners.com website there are only 2 client reviews that quickly cycle across the screen. One review is supposedly from James Collins of Devon Energy and the other is from Charles Roberts of A.G.Edwards Inc. But the image used to represent Mr. James Collins of Devon Energy is a stock photo found on more than 100 websites across the Internet. Also, we were able to locate about 70+ employees of Devon Energy, which is a legitimate company, on LinkedIn. But none of these employees had the name James Collins. As for the image of Charles Roberts, it is definitely a stock photo that can be found in the iStock photo collection. Also making the review by Charles Roberts seem less credible is the fact that the testimonial states that he works for A.G.Edwards Inc. According to Google’s AI, “A.G. Edwards is no longer in business as an independent entity. The firm was acquired by Wachovia in 2007 and subsequently became part of Wells Fargo in 2008. The A.G. Edwards name was phased out, and its operations were merged into Wells Fargo Advisors.”
- The Trademark Winners website claims that they have a “100% satisfaction rate” with their customers, but on April 4 we found 13% of the 31 reviews on Trustpilot are 1-star reviews, including a late December, 2025 post by someone who claimed this business stole money from her because she paid them and she alleges that they never filied her trademark.
We strongly suspect that it is a small group of cybercriminals behind the overwhelming majority of questionable, suspicious or fraudulent trademark businesses. This suspicion is largely due to the many times that we find identical, or nearly identical content across many different trademark business websites over time, such as this example from both ustrademarkofficial.com and ustmofficial.com. Both sites show the same photos and credentials for their attorneys named Rebecca L. Hughes and Jonathan M. Carter. However, a reverse image search informed us that these photos were likely stolen from the law firm website at Wilentz.com. The woman on the left is Grace D. Mack and the man on the right is Michael F. Schaff. (These same photos, along with the names Rebecca L. Hughes and Jonathan M. Carter, can also be found on the newly registered website called usatrademarkers.com. It was registered on 1/30/2026 through Namecheap.) Ustmofficial.com was registered in the European Union on 9/9/2025 and ustrademarkofficial.com was registered on 5/7/2024.
During the last few years, exposing this type of fraud and suspicious businesses has been like wack-a-mole. When we find and expose a dozen trademark businesses, just weeks later another two dozen or more can be found across the Internet! And like the above example, sometimes these suspicous businesses use information about real people whose information is being abused. For example, a website called LegalZoomUS.com appears to offer affordable trademark registration packages. On their website, they identify two of their attorneys as Brandy Contreras and someone simply named Michael L. We found a LinkedIn account for Brandy Contreras that had an identical photo to the one on LegalZoomUS.com. But the real Attorney Contreras appears to have been exclusively working in the entertainment industry for the last 8 years, according to her LinkedIn account. It appears that she has never worked as a trademark attorney. (By the way, the LegalZoomUS.com website shows a bunch of high-star reviews from Trustpilot scrolling across the screen. It claims to have an overall rating on Trustpilot of 4.6 Stars. However, when we visited Trustpilot on April 4 about this company, Trustpilot showed ZERO reviews! And, as is often the case about these businesses, LegalZoomUS.com was recently registered on February 11, less than 2 months ago. Scam-Detector rates this newly registered business as suspicious and dubious.)
There is one more thing that is unusual about 120-plus suspicious/fraudulent websites we have found acting as trademark registration businesses. We rarely see them identified as malicious on VirusTotal.com. Here the reports of a few that have been found on VirusTotal….
Quite frankly, the amount of suspicious content, or outright fraud, that we have found in the world of trademark businesses is exhausting! To all of the business people, and to anyone considering acquiring a trademark to protect a logo, name, or other piece of intellectual property, we urge you to do your due diligence to research a company before hiring them! This includes verifying that the person who will be assisting you is a Licensed Attorney for the state in which you operate! And in case some real Attorney’s personal information is being misused, make sure to confirm that the Attorney you will work with is, in fact, who they say they are! If you find this person on two different law firm websites, that’s a problem! If this person will not have a video chat with you, that’s also a problem! As always, you are welcome to contact us and ask for our opinion.
The US White House App Tracks Your Location, Sketchy Social Media Posts & More!
All too often, we find ourselves shaking our heads in disbelief about the unexpected things we learn in our effort to fight fraud, protect privacy and advocate for consumers. Sadly, the latest “head shake” in disbelief concerns our own government. On March 27, the White House released a new app for Americans to download on their phones, both iPhones and Android phones. According to their news page on the White House website, this app enables citizens to…
- Receive breaking news alerts on major announcements, executive actions, and other key priorities.
- Watch live streams of briefings, speeches, and historic moments as they happen.
- Dive into a dynamic media library packed with highlights.
- Stay connected on the latest policy breakthroughs.
- Send your voice and feedback directly to the Administration.
However, on March 28, the International Business Times, published from the UK, revealed that this White House App was found to be collecting exact geolocation data, sometimes without consent, every 4.5 – 5.0 minutes and sending it to a third-party server at OneSignal. (This was also confirmed by a Reddit Community member who alleges that he knows something about coding too.) What makes this revelation so offensive to us is that anyone who installs this app from our own government will be tracked and have that data stored by a third party business acting on behalf of our government. This data collection and reporting happens whether the app is open or not. According to the UK article, you are not given any means to turn this data-gathering off. This excessive breach of privacy is unacceptable and we do not recommend that anyone install this app! In fact, please share this information with anyone you know who might be interested in downloading and installing this White House App.
And speaking of tracking you, Courtney Jordan, a former federal prosecutor, posted on her Instagram account that she recently discovered a setting on iPhones that, when turned on, will show you what apps track you in a variety of ways and when. I just checked my list of apps tracking me and discovered that the Apple Health App was visiting my contact list daily. The problem with that is that I never use the Health app and haven’t opened it in many months! I have now deleted it from my phone. You can find Courtney Jordan’s explanation how to turn on this app monitoring service and where to see the results on this Instagram post.
For a good laugh, check out this woman’s short video on her Instagram account as she shows you the best way to stop scam calls and having your phone number removed from their list! It’s priceless, though we also like the option of grabbing an airhorn can and noise-cancelling headphones.
In early April, someone named Anthony Wallace posted on the community site NextDoor that he was looking for “a hardworking young professional” to join his duct-cleaning business. He named the business as “Duct Cleaning and HVAC Services” which sounds super-generic! He never offered a more specific name for the business, but he did include a link to a generic Google form to collect applicant’s information. That form also invited interested people to text him at 800-707-1731. These facts struck us as very odd. When we Googled that phone number, it led to an awful review on Yelp of a nationwide duct cleaning company. There are 11 reviews from people in several states and most of them are 1-star! Also, when we conducted a search for this business, it turned up a Facebook account with that exact business name and phone number found in the Yelp review. A recent post on March 13 also invited people to get a discounted quote. Now here is where this duct cleaning business gets REALLY interesting…. Business Facebook accounts like this one…. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100095221584778&locale=nb_NO# …..have something called a Transparency page (but they are not easy to locate unless you know how.) The Transparency page for this Business’ Facebook account says that this business’ account is managed by 2 people in Pakistan! In my opinion, this strongly suggests this business and this post is a type of fraud. To find and open the transparency page of a group account on Facebook, do the following… 1. Click once on the name of the account in large print, found just underneath the large top banner. 2. In the popup window, click the item called “Transparency and privacy policy” 3. Scroll down the next window and look at “People who manage this page.” Looking at a Facebook group’s or business’ Transparency page is often very revealing!
And speaking of NextDoor, during the past year we often saw posts offering various products for sale such as spinners and toys for cats. Each of these posts came from people who were fairly new to NextDoor and the links they provided were to highly suspicious, newly registered businesses! Below is a recent example. The spinner link points to spinard[.]buzz, a domain that was set up hours before this post appeared! Scam-Detector finds this site to be risky and dangerous!
Recently, Scambaiter Rob sent us this very weird phone conversation between his old-man bot and a caller named “Mike Wilson” who claims to be with WWP World Wide Publicist. Rob’s Bot goes completely nuts on this call and Mike seems to enjoy it and hangs in there, patiently engaging with the Bot. Honestly, we can’t understand Mike’s accent when he tells the Bot why he’s calling but we sure enjoyed their 2 and half-minute exchange!
Call from Mike Wilson
As usual, we have a collection of interesting articles to recommend to you about scams!
This Vice article reports that a scammer convicted of stealing millions of dollars must pay back the streaming services he defrauded! He used AI to generate billions of music streams and collect money from them! That’s a switch!
According to this FBI post, an increase of malware that targeted ATM machines enabled criminals to get the ATMs to spit out cash! Check out: https://www.ic3.gov/CSA/2026/260219.pdf
A college student almost fell for this scam intended to collect her personal data. It’s called a Captcha scam:
https://www.aol.com/news/captcha-test-scam-hijacks-victim-145556709.html
According to the Consumer Federation of America, Americans are expected to annually lose about $119 billion to scams! That’s crazy!
https://consumerfed.org/press_release/americans-estimated-to-lose-119-billion-annually-to-online-scams/
We trust that you know by now that “Caller IDs” can be manipulated by scammers. Even phone numbers can be spoofed to display one phone number but the call comes from another number! Check out just some of the many phone numbers that called my phone and claiming to represent the “Amer Red Cross” last week! This article/Ad has some helpful information about understanding this manipulation…
https://www.bgr.com/guides/no-caller-id-how-to-know-who-called/
Here is information about government grant scams, posted on the Federal Trade Commission website:
https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2026/03/how-avoid-government-grant-scams-offer-free-money-personal-expenses
5 Tax scams to look out for this season. (FYI: lots of ads are on this MSN page) https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/5-tax-scams-to-watch-for-this-filing-season/ar-AA1XwB6X
Another retiree’s life savings were lost to a romance scam:
https://www.aol.com/articles/bubble-popped-san-francisco-retiree-113000926.html
The UK is taking steps to dismantle some of the tools commonly used by scammers to defraud their citizens. The United States should take these steps too!
A Chicago bus driver fell victim to a new highly-discounted phone scam:
https://www.aol.com/finance/chicago-bus-driver-falls-victim-113000405.html
In case you didn’t already know it, it is painfully hard and very time consuming to opt out of all of the data broker sites that sell your personal data and are found across the internet! Here is a partial list of some of the sites that are selling your data and you will likely want to opt out of… https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-List
This Philadelphia Attorney tells a Senate panel how he almost fell victim to a scam that used AI to mimic his son’s voice… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJsz_B843Ks
If this happens to you and your child tells you, over the phone, that his nose is broken, giving him an excuse that his voice may sound a bit off, or that his phone was taken from him which is why he’s calling from a different number, you should be extremely suspicious! Ask your child a question that ONLY he or she would know the answer to! If your child can’t answer it, hang up and call your child directly. If you can’t reach him/her, try calling their closest friends and siblings!
Finding Funny Phish Fraud (Say it 3x fast!)
We have a small collection of phishing fraud that each contain something very funny, making each very easy to see through their fraud. We’re always grateful when fraud can actually put a smile on our collective faces! In this first fraud, an email from Kazakhstan using Kyrgyz language, and containing blank customer information, is simply a joy to behold!
How is your confidence level in an email about a Norton LifeLock invoice that was simultaneously sent to 15 email addresses seen in the TO field? Credible, right?! Oh, and the email didn’t come from Norton!
And finally, it’s nice to see that PayPal has changed their name to P@yP@l! Remember to report your smelly phish to us and Google! https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/
Delta Seasonal Travel Credit & an American Paradoxical Home Warranty
It’s probably reasonable to assume that Delta has many millions of customers who have flown on their airline over the decades of their existence. So how nice is it when you see an email in your inbox claiming to be a Delta Seasonal Travel Credit of $300! But wait! Before you click this link, notice that this email didn’t come from Delta.com! It came from a website called linkreveal[.]com. The “claim your credit” button also points back to this website. This is really weird because linkreveal[.]com supposedly reveals shortened link destinations. Not sure what’s going on there but VirusTotal now shows that website is malicious!
We love the inherent paradox created by an email claiming to represent American Home Shield, but coming from the European Union and containing a link to a website in Germany! Lunge for the delete key!
Docusign Malicious Mimics!
A clever trick often used by cybercriminals is to register domain names that appear similar to, or related to legitimate websites and businesses. This email wants you to believe it came from Docusign, whose real domain is docusign.com. But this email came from docusign[.]support which was registered in the European Union on March 5, hours before this email was received! The links in this clickbait point to another very malicious mimic at docu-sign[.]online, registered on March 4 in the European Union. That link points to malware and that’s a serious risk! Deeeeleeeeeete!
Toll Violation Notices are Exploding on People’s Phones!
During the last couple of months there has been an explosion of fake court documents arriving as graphic files via text onto people’s phones! Lots of our friends and readers have been reporting these to us, and reports have been increasing. E.g. Two recent reports to us were texts containing jpg files labelled 6f58950e- and 5be68a6e-. These jpg files each had a QR code pointing to a website registered in China on 4/10/2025 called kitchencabinetsnc[.]com. VirusTotal has a security service that shows this website is a phishing scam!
However, it’s also important to note that official State notices will also never, ever contact you via texting! Especially when that text to an American citizen comes from a phone number starting with the International calling code for the UK, +44! The scam domain used in this fraud is actually gov-tdr[.]cfd. It was registered in Singapore just hours before this text was received.
Until next week, surf safely!
Copyright © 2026 The Daily Scam. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have subscribed to thedailyscam.com
Marblehead, MA 01945