Anyone filing an international patent application (PCT) today is soon pushed to register in WIPO’s system \u2013 and finds their inbox filling up with dubious payment demands. Neither is a coincidence; both are the result of a policy that consistently shifts burdens and risks onto applicants. A critical assessment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyone who files an international patent application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) \u2013 for example through the European Patent Office (EPO) as receiving Office \u2013 regularly experiences two things. Shortly after filing, messages arrive from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) urging registration in its electronic ePCT system. And the e-mail address provided at filing fills up within weeks with deceptively authentic-looking “invoices” and “registration offers”. Both phenomena deserve a critical look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As recently as 2008, electronic communication was a mere add-on service: by ticking a box on the PCT request form, the applicant could authorise an “advance copy” of notifications by e-mail. The legally decisive channel remained delivery on paper. WIPO put it unmistakably at the time: the e-mail communications did not replace the “paper notifications sent by mail as usual, which will remain the legal copy”<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This coexistence ended abruptly. On 30 March 2020, in the course of its COVID-19 business-continuity protocol, WIPO’s International Bureau stopped sending paper documents and announced that it would henceforth transmit PCT documents “exclusively via email”<\/em>. What began as a temporary pandemic measure has to this day \u2013 in 2026 \u2013 never been reversed. Electronic delivery has thus shifted from a convenience to the de facto standard; the traditional paper mail that many applicants prefer for good reason has practically ceased to exist. A voluntary add-on option has become \u2013 without any formal change in the law, solely through a never-ended “emergency measure” \u2013 a largely alternative-less channel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In parallel, WIPO pushes its users into the ePCT system. Anyone who wants to view an application online, actively manage it or make submissions needs a “WIPO account” with “strong authentication” \u2013 in practice a smartphone app or a security token. Shared access to a file is additionally controlled via so-called “eHandshakes”, that is, the mutual linking of authenticated WIPO accounts before any access rights (eOwner, eEditor, eViewer) can even be assigned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For large firms with a steady PCT practice this may be manageable. For occasional applicants, small and medium-sized enterprises or individual inventors, however, it means that in order merely to receive official communications they are expected to familiarise themselves with an account, app and rights-management system. Many \u2013 understandably \u2013 do not want to. Particularly unfortunate here is an inherent contradiction: the very organisation that sends unsolicited prompts to register and confirm an account warns elsewhere, in the strongest terms, against precisely such “official-looking” e-mails. For the recipient, the line between a legitimate prompt and phishing becomes blurred \u2013 a home-made problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second point of criticism weighs more heavily. The International Bureau publishes every PCT application 18 months after the priority date in the freely accessible PATENTSCOPE database \u2013 with the names and addresses of applicants and representatives, application and publication numbers, title, IPC symbols and priority details. This data is systematically harvested and used to fuel a decades-old industry of misleading requests for payment: deceptively authentic-looking “invoices” for supposed registrations or publications that have nothing to do with WIPO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The scale is remarkable. WIPO itself maintains a warning list of fraudulent senders covering the period from 2002 to 2024 \u2013 a documented problem spanning more than twenty years. Recently the attack vector has shifted: alongside the classic paper “invoices”, e-mail phishing is on the rise. In a warning dated 10 April 2026, WIPO reports fake e-mails impersonating WIPO, the EPO and the EUIPO \u2013 for instance via spoofed addresses such as At this point, fairness is called for. The dubious invoices and phishing e-mails do not come from WIPO. They are third-party fraud, against which WIPO expressly warns and which it occasionally even helps to pursue \u2013 as in the case stopped by the Florida Attorney General in 2009. Anyone who blames the flood of spam directly on WIPO misreads the facts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet the criticism remains justified. For WIPO is not a neutral bystander but the operator of the infrastructure that makes the abuse possible in the first place. It obliges applicants to disclose their contact data, keeps the data source fully open year after year, and shifts the entire burden of vigilance onto those affected by way of a warning notice. At the same time, by abolishing paper delivery it has removed precisely that low-threshold, hard-to-scale channel that many applicants valued as a robust fallback. The result is a structure in which applicants must either enter WIPO’s ecosystem or risk missing official communications \u2013 and in which their data flows, in any event, into a fraud market known since 2002. An organisation that has documented the problem for so long could do more than warn: it could refrain from publicly exposing e-mail addresses, offer a genuine opt-out or paper option, and act more decisively against the senders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until the practice changes, a structured approach is advisable:<\/p>\n\n\n\n WIPO’s communication practice is convenient for the organisation and inconvenient for applicants. The quietly perpetuated farewell to paper, the pressure to register and the unrestricted publication of contact data together paint a picture that is hard to reconcile with the claim of being a reliable, applicant-friendly authority. Until WIPO improves matters here, the rule is: every “official-looking” message following a PCT filing deserves a healthy dose of scepticism \u2013 and a firm processing protocol within the firm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Anyone filing an international patent application (PCT) today is soon pushed to register in WIPO’s system \u2013 and finds their inbox filling up with dubious payment demands. Neither is a coincidence; both are the result of a policy that consistently … Continue reading The Pressure to Register: Account, App and “eHandshake”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Open Data Source: How a Filing Turns Into Spam<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
admin@wipo-office.com<\/code> \u2013 demanding payment for the supposed securing of IP rights. WIPO’s key statement reads: “None of these organizations \u2013 WIPO, EPO or EUIPO \u2013 will solicit payments through unsolicited emails”<\/em>. Anyone filing a PCT application therefore feeds their contact data into an environment whose misuse the organisation has long been aware of.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Fairness: The Spam Does Not Come From WIPO \u2013 But WIPO Enables It<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What Applicants Can Do<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
@wipo.int<\/code>, and neither WIPO nor the EPO demands payment by unsolicited e-mail. Only the International Bureau charges fees for international publication \u2013 there is no separate third-party “publication fee”.<\/li>\n\n\n\nConclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n