In 2018, their business advisor reviewed their assets and found out that they did not own a trade mark for their business.
He immediately insisted that they must apply for a trade mark as he knew just how vulnerable their business was without it.
The two partners didn’t think much of it at the time, but their business advisor was insistent, so they went ahead and registered the brand as a trade mark in Australia anyway without really knowing what protection it would afford them.
Their application was successful, and they soon owned the trade mark registration rights for the brand “Wireless 1”. They received the trade mark certificate, which they filed away alongside other company paperwork and thought no more of it.
Fast forward to 2024, David & Tuong found the true power of a trade mark registration.
Tuong and David’s clients started ringing his company to complain about not receiving products they had paid for. To their dismay, they discovered that a scam company had set up a fraudulent ‘Wireless 1’ website and was trading on their name. It was an exact duplicate of their site! It was using their site’s popularity and success to lure in targets, then rob them of their money while Tuong and David’s business took the blame.
If they could not shut the fake site down, it would continue to harm their customers, and it would be only a matter of time before Wireless 1 would lose its good reputation, credibility, and income, which may lead them to close their business if they could not shut down the fake website.
David and Tuong took action. They contacted the police fraud squad, who first asked for proof of ownership of the brand name Wireless 1. Truong retrieved the certificate and presented it, and with that, the police could take action to have the copycat site shut down. Without it, the police said they would have been powerless to assist them.
With police backing, the business owners contacted Google, who also asked for their trade mark registration number, and said that they could not have taken action without it, as they would have no way of knowing who was the real owner of Wireless 1.
Since they did have their trademark registration for Wireless 1, Google immediately shut down the fake site, allowing Tuong and David to stop further damage to their brand and resume business straight away.
