Basically this exact same thing happened to my business with an individual (some guy who’s main business appeared to be acquiring and selling domains) who setup a very similar trademark, registered the domain (very similar), setup a dummy business on the domain, and then sent us a cease and desist trying to extort (we did a call with them where they basically told us they knew it’d cost us a lot of money to litigate and it cost them almost nothing to keep their dummy business up) us for six figures.
We ended up litigating and canceling their registered trademark with the USPTO by proving our business and website were setup before theirs. If you have over 7+ years of business and public records this should be a pretty open and close case. The bad news is however even if that is the case it can take 2-3 years (probably due to pandemic)and a lot of money. In our case it cost less than $10k, so the guy’s extortion made no sense.
It also didn’t help their case that the guy lifted verbatim copy from my website, including my TOS with my address! I’m not sure if the judge even looked at this though.
We ended up litigating and canceling their registered trademark with the USPTO by proving our business and website were setup before theirs. If you have over 7+ years of business and public records this should be a pretty open and close case. The bad news is however even if that is the case it can take 2-3 years (probably due to pandemic)and a lot of money. In our case it cost less than $10k, so the guy’s extortion made no sense.
It also didn’t help their case that the guy lifted verbatim copy from my website, including my TOS with my address! I’m not sure if the judge even looked at this though.