Trademarked

After a several month process, we received word this week from the US Patent and Trademark Office stating that our trademarks (the Triple Threat Triathlon name as well as our logo) are now complete. Not a huge deal, but I thought that was pretty cool. We can now use the little R by our name if we so please, and fire out cease and desist letters if the mood strikes us. Fun! As a side note, I’d like to issue a few of those to my kids regarding some of their behavior, but alas they’d probably just color on them.

I was reminded during this process that there’s a scam out there for most situations in life. As an internet rookie surfing the “world wide web” back in 1996, I remember receiving an official looking pop up window one day saying something like “your computer’s been hacked, we need to verify your credit card information.” I fell for it hook, line, and sinker, handing over the keys to my parent’s credit card like it was a piece of laffy taffy. Afterwards I had a sneaking suspicion that I might have been duped, and my wise father immediately canceled the card. Since then I’ve only had one slip up, wiring my savings to Nigeria a few years ago for a cut of the Prince’s inheritance. Alright, jk… I’m not that dumb.

Anyways, while we were waiting on the trademarks to come through, it was comical to see three separate solicitations come across the Triple Threat desk… one from Hungary, one from Slovakia, and one from the Czech Republic, each claiming to be an International Trademark Organization of some sort. They each had our name and logo on the document, but besides that they were pretty bush league, with broken English, misspellings everywhere, etc. They immediately failed the smell test, but just for fun I googled the first "organization," and sure enough it had SCAM written all over it. I guess I can’t knock their hustle, and I got a good laugh out of the offer… by wiring ~$2,500 (all were near that amount) to an eastern European bank account, they would essentially record us in their “book.” Did their book hold any weight or carry any significance at all? Nope. To their credit, the last one actually had fine print on the back stating that there was nothing official about them, that “listing” with them didn’t carry any weight at all. But who wouldn’t want to be listed with these guys?? An upfront payment and a recurring annual fee seem like a small price to pay for such international fame and glory.... what a deal!