The Italian Competition Authority, concluding its investigation, has discovered an improper commercial practice by the company A-286 Suarl, in violation of articles 20, 24 and 25, para. 1, letter d) of the Consumer Code.

In particular, on the basis of the assessments carried out and of indications reported in several requests of intervention sent to the ICA since June 12th, 2017, by the Guardia di Finanza, the Chamber of Commerce of Venice Rovigo and Delta Lagunare, the Chamber of Commerce of Biella and Vercelli, the Municipality of Silea and many companies established in Italy , the ICA found that this practice was implemented by a communication sent by regular mail to Companies with head offices in Italy, that had previously made a request of registration at the Italian Patent and Trademark Office.

The commercial communication diffused by A-286Suarl was in the form of a payment module, needed to validate the registration of a brand at the Italian Patent and Trademark Office. Mailing this module and the payment requested are not actually connected with the request of registration for trademarks and patents at the Italian Office previously carried out by the contacted enterprises but aimed to obtain the unaware payment of a non-requested service by them,, consisting in the insertion of their own company in an Internet advertising data bank.

The Italian Competition Authority has ascertained that the specific modes with which A-286 Suarl establishes and transmits its messages, from a graphical point of view, as well as the scheduling and the content, constitute expedients that the company uses to condition the recipients of these communications improperly, artfully inducing them to assume a commercial decision that they would not have adopted otherwise.

The communication is, in fact, structurally conceived as a pre-printed module used to require the payment related to the registration in a registry called “Registry of Italian trademarks”.

In this module, they use expressions like “Registry of Italian Trademarks”, “classification of Nizza”, even the expression “REGISTRATION OF THE ABOVEMENTIONED BRAND OF ENTERPRISE IN THE REGISTRY OF ITALIAN TRADEMARKS FOR A PERIOD OF 10 YEARS”.

The recipients of this module are therefore made to believe that this “Registry” is truly an official registry managed by the Italian Patent and Trademark Office, considering that in the text of the module there is a reference to the legal protection at the Italian Patent and Trademark Office and that the addressee of the communication has previously requested the legal protection of its brand at the National level.

The prescriptive indication of a time limit within which the contacted company seems to be categorically obligated to pay for the requested amount, contributes to increase the undue conditioning of the freedom of choice of the recipient (term specifically defined for each contacted company).

The ICA has imposed an administrative penalty of 500.000 euro to the A-286 Suarl because of the remarkable trickiness of the message diffused , that responds to a precise communication strategy used to create deliberate confusion in the recipient companies.

Rome, 12 April 2018