Since 2006, we have been writing about fake China law firms. See China Where Even The “Law Firms” Are Fake. In that post we talked about fake Chinese lawyers taking money from American companies for trademark registrations:
There are those who take money to file trademarks in China and then simply run away. A new client told me he had sent about $750 to what he thought was a legitimate China law firm to have his company’s brand name registered. As soon as the first $750 hit Shanghai, he was asked to send an additional $600 to “cover the filing fees,” which he did.
A week later the website was down and the Shanghai “firm” was gone, “leaving no solid clues, nor trace, only a space in the lives of their friends.”* * * *
It turns out this scam is actually pretty common and it also turns out that in every case of which I am aware the scammers were neither licensed Chinese lawyers nor licensed Chinese trademark agents. In other words, they are just people who run China trademark registration scams.
This sort of fakery has been going on ever since and every so often one of our China lawyers gets word of an American or European company that paid thousands of dollars to register a trademark in China or to have a China employment contract drafted or to have a company registered in China, only to receive nothing but silence in return and only to learn that the “China law firm”or the “China lawyer” they paid never really existed. Every so often companies we have to tell a new client their trademarks were never registered in China or they actually have no company there.
I am writing this now because I recently received an email from a China lawyer I know who is working on the worst (because it is the largest) fake China lawyer scam of which anyone at my law firm has been made aware. Here is the email I got on this:
Hey Dan, just read your article about the fake firms.
We are currently running an investigation on behalf of a client who was swindled out of $600,000+. The scammers used a fake law firm with fake lawyers (the profiles were copied from a sample site used by a web design company). The Whois search showed an apparently fake Italian address, and an Israeli cell number. Money deposited into a Chinese bank account.
A real mess.
We have no reason to believe any licensed (a/k/a real) China lawyer has had any part in any of these fake China lawyer schemes and every reason to believe none has.
So how can you avoid getting caught up in something like this? Confirm that your lawyer(s) actually have a law license. That alone ought to solve all of your problems. I believe that every U.S. state lists its licensed practitioners online and avvo.com also lists all or nearly all licensed lawyers. Check that for any alleged American lawyer you use.
Do some due diligence before you pay/hire a China lawyer without an American bar license (of which there are many many good ones), especially if you will be paying upfront for something like a China trademark or a China company registration where it may take you years to realize that you have been had.
Once again, we urge you to beware of fake Chinese law firms. They are wreaking real havoc out there.
