Guide · Scam or Real

That “Someone Is Registering Your Trademark in China” Email: Scam or Real?

Updated August 2026 · 7 min read · Sources cited from seller communities and China’s official registry

The email shows up unannounced: “URGENT — someone is attempting to register your trademark in China. Respond within days or lose rights to your brand name.” Some attach a PDF that looks like an official filing notice. Some include a deadline, an application number, and wiring instructions.

Before you pay anyone anything, the honest answer to “scam or real?” is: both exist. Some of these emails are mass-mailed scams that monetize panic. Others are genuine warnings — and behind some of them, someone really has filed your brand name with China’s trademark registry. The email itself can’t tell you which one you’re looking at. China’s official registry can.

Here’s a 30-second scam test, the mechanics of real squatting, how to run the registry check yourself, and what each response path costs if the threat turns out to be real.

First, the honest answer: both emails exist

The scam version. China trademark email scams are an industry. They feed on public data: when your US or EU trademark application publishes, your brand name enters public databases, and list-builders work from exactly that. The pitch varies — pay to “block” the filing, pay for an “urgent registration,” pay for a “certified search report.” The USPTO itself maintains public warnings about solicitations that mimic official trademark correspondence, because enough applicants have been burned. The product is fear; the delivery mechanism is a countdown clock.

The real version. Trademark squatting in China is also real, and it recurs. In 2021 on r/FulfillmentByAmazon, a seller posted a thread titled “Someone filed my trademark in CN” — and went out of his way to distinguish it from the scam noise: “Not a fake ass email, but a trademark search I performed myself.” He had run the search, found the filing, and understood exactly what it could do to him: “the CN trademark owner can hold up inventory I get made in CN and essentially make me pay ransom.”

“I’ve dealt with this probably 50 times in the last dozen years.” — Commenter with ~30 years in Hong Kong sourcing and compliance, on the same 2021 r/FulfillmentByAmazon thread

It’s not isolated. In another 2021 thread, a UK brand with a registered UK trademark found a third party applying to register their name in China. In a 2019 thread, a seller described watching a competitor file his largest brand’s name.

Which means: you can’t adjudicate this from your inbox. Nearly identical email copy covers both a scam and a genuine threat. Take the 30-second test below — then believe the registry, not the email.

The 30-second scam test: five signals

Run the email through these five checks. Two or more red flags? Treat it as a scam until the registry proves otherwise.

1. Manufactured urgency. “Respond within 48 hours.” Real China trademark deadlines run in months — the opposition window alone is three months. Countdown-clock copy is a sales tactic, not procedure.
2. No application number. Every genuine CNIPA filing carries an application number that resolves in the official database. An email claiming someone filed your trademark, with no number — or a number that resolves to nothing — has told you nothing.
3. “Only we can act for you.” Oppositions and filings go through any licensed China trademark agent, and you choose yours. A real adviser doesn’t need a monopoly to be useful.
4. Payment is the product. The call to action is a fee — to “stop” the filing, to “file first,” to release a report. Never pay a stranger who contacted you to solve a problem only they have described.
5. Vague identity, broken English. No verifiable firm name, no agency record, grammar no professional IP correspondent would produce. Be careful with the reverse logic, though: polished scams exist, so clean copy doesn’t prove the email is real. Sloppy copy is close to conclusive the other way.

One caveat: passing all five checks still doesn’t make the email real. It just means it’s well-made. The registry is the only evidence that counts.

If it’s real: how squatting actually works

Three structural facts drive the whole problem:

• China is first-to-file. Unlike the US first-to-use system, the trademark generally belongs to whoever files it first — even if the brand is yours and you’ve sold it for years. As a seller in that 2019 thread put it: “China’s trademark process is ‘first to file’ and not ‘first to use’ like the USA…”
• Customs is the pressure point. Once a squatter’s registration is approved, they can record it with Chinese customs — and customs can stop goods carrying “their” mark from leaving the country. The same thread: “…they can pay to file with Chinese customs to stop any shipment leaving the country.”
• Your inventory is inside the jurisdiction. If your products are manufactured in China, the goods a squatter can hold hostage are physically sitting in China — whether or not you’ve ever sold a unit there.

The ask, per seller-community reports in 2026, is $10,000–$30,000 to buy the mark back. The alternative one seller described: “2+ years into litigation… Money well spent.” Worth it, he meant — but two years is two years.

Who’s actually at risk, honestly. If you neither manufacture nor sell in China, your exposure is genuinely lower, and plenty of sellers in these same threads call the issue “a non-issue unless you sell in China.” Don’t let anyone — including us — talk you into panic spending. But notice the pattern in the real cases above: they’re sellers whose goods are made in China, because that’s what gives a squatter customs leverage. Your products don’t need to be sold in China to be blocked from leaving it.

How to check whether someone filed your trademark in China

The authoritative source is the CNIPA’s official trademark database — free, public, and reachable via the China Trademark Office site (sbj.cnipa.gov.cn). You can run a basic search yourself today. Set expectations first:

1. The interface is Chinese. Fields, status codes, and instructions are all in Chinese. Machine translation helps, but status codes carry legal meaning that translation flattens.
2. Your name may be filed in a form you’d never type. Squatters file the Latin script, a Chinese transliteration, or both. A brand like “Everline” can be taken under a Chinese name that approximates its sound. An English exact-match search never sees it coming.
3. Near-matches count. Chinese examination weighs similarity in sound, meaning, and appearance, across 45 classes — and squatters pick the classes you’ll actually need.

A free exact-match search is a reasonable first move, and we’d rather you did it than sat on the email. But a clean result is reassuring, not conclusive, for exactly the reasons above. That’s the gap our $149 squatting scan fills: a China-based consultant runs your name plus its transliteration variants across your relevant classes and returns a risk-graded English report in 72 hours.

It’s real. Your four options

Opposition. If the application is still inside its three-month publication window, you can oppose it through a licensed China trademark agent. Earlier discovery is what keeps this door open — which is the strongest argument for checking now rather than after a customs stop.

Buy-back. It’s what the squatter wants, and some sellers report lower asks early, before the squatter has spent money building the customs chain. If you go this route, get the transfer terms in writing and keep the paper trail.

Invalidate or wait. China has stepped up refusals and invalidation of bad-faith filings in recent years, and applications overall reportedly clear at only about a 50% rate — a squatter’s filing is not a done deal. But “eventually” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. This path is patience, not a plan, unless the mark is peripheral to your business.

Rebrand for China. Register a distinct Chinese name — plus your Latin mark — and route around the squatted one. Sellers in these threads put basic China filing at “about $500,” which is the entire logic of prevention.

All four paths cost more than checking early. As one seller in the 2021 thread put it: “it costs a few hundred dollars but can potentially save you from problems which can results in thousands dollars worth of losses.”

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