Attorney warns regarding spoof TMVIEW search site
Site could be tracking trademark searches.
Attorney John Berryhill is warning people regarding a website that he states is spoofing the popular TMview trademark search database. It appears that a business tied to Michael Gleissner is running the site.
fake TMVIEW page at tmview .com – records your search and then falls over to the actual TMDN page. Using lookups for domain regs.
— John Berryhill (@Berryhillj) August 11, 2017
The official TMview website run by EUIPO is at tmdn.org. It lets people search across multiple trademark databases, and is a popular site for trademark attorneys running preliminary checks.
If you go to TMview.com, still, you’ll see a site that looks very much like TMDN.org. The links at the top for “regarding” and “news” etc. don’t work, and the news updates are a couple years old. Here’s a comparison:
If you submit a search on the fake site it forwards you to the real site but doesn’t perform the search. Berryhill believes it’s set up to record searches that attorneys are using to run preliminary checks ahead of filings trademarks.
In case that was not clear – Tmview .com is a phishing page copied from @EU_IPO to fool IP lawyers doing preliminary clearance searches.
— John Berryhill (@Berryhillj) August 11, 2017
So who is behind the spoof site? The domain is registered to Institute of Advanced Networking Technologies LLC, but the whois email address is [email protected].
Bigfoot is a firm connected to Michael Gleissner, who has been criticized for questionable trademark filings and activities. His firms have lost many UDRPs for dictionary words, were ordered by UK’s Intellectual Property Office to pay a fine to Apple, and have filed trademarks matching .com domain names they don’t own. One of Bigfoot’s employees even suggested on his LinkedIn page that he was in the business of reverse domain name hijacking domain names.
So you can understand why Berryhill states this site is up to no good. Could trademark searches performed on the spoof site be correlated to trademark applications made by firms tied to Gleissner or domains registered?
