China

China: Where Even The Lawyers Are Fake

The key to avoiding this sort of scam is to do your due diligence on your China lawyers just as you do with any other good-sized transaction

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Drugs, money, razor blades, cigarettes, food, colleges, shoes, music, auto parts, Starbucks stores, software, purses, and even Playboy bunnies. China has counterfeited all of these things. Approximately 90 percent of counterfeit goods seized at the U.S. border come from China. None of this shocks anymore.

But are you aware of fake China law firms?

These “firms” mostly take money to file for trademarks and copyrights in China or to draft China manufacturing or employment contracts. Then they disappear.  

A couple weeks ago, 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 in China. 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 “law firm” was gone, “leaving no solid clues, nor trace, only a space in the lives of their friends.” At least this American company realized quickly that it had been had.

This sort of scam has been going on for many years. I first wrote about it back in 2006, in China: Where Even the Law Firms are Fake. But it definitely seems to have picked up in the last year or so.

I have heard multiple accounts of U.S. companies that paid for trademarks or contracts or company registrations or various other legal things that China lawyers typically do for their clients, only to later learn that the “law firm” or the “lawyer” never even existed. How many U.S. companies believe that their trademarks are registered in China when in fact they never were? Have you checked your China trademark lately? How many think that they have a company registered in China when they do not? My small law firm comes across at least a few of these non-filings every year.

In every single China lawyer scam case of which I am aware, the scammers were neither licensed Chinese lawyers nor licensed Chinese trademark agents. In other words, these scams are being propagated by run-of-the-mill con artists posing as China lawyers and IP agents, not by anyone with a law license. It is even quite likely that some of these con artists are neither based in China nor Chinese.

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The key to avoiding this sort of scam is to do your due diligence on your China lawyers just as you do with any other good-sized transaction, 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.

Like most things China, caveat emptor.

Dan Harris is a founding member of Harris Moure, an international law firm with lawyers in Seattle, Chicago, Beijing, and Qingdao. He is also a co-editor of the China Law Blog. You can reach him by email at firm@harrismoure.com.

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