Two companies, Patent and Trade Mark Office and Patent and Trade Mark Organisation, have been ordered to stop offering the services and pay a “substantial” fine to the IPO, the office said.

The companies, and their owners Aleksandrs Radcuks and Igors Villers, had been accused of issuing official-looking “renewal letters” to trademark owners offering to renew trademarks at higher fees than usual.

The IPO, which is the official government body that grants patents and trademarks in the UK, filed a lawsuit in May at the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court.

A spokesman for the IPO said it knew that some of its customers had been misled into making “excessive payments” because they thought they were paying the IPO or a company affiliated with it.

“We felt it was necessary to take appropriate action given the evidence that our customers are being misled or confused and that damage is being caused to the office’s good name,” the IPO said.

The office also revealed it is carrying out litigation against another organisation offering the renewal letters.

In June last year, WIPR reported that an organisation called Intellectual Property Agency (IPA) had been told it breached advertising codes by sending out similar renewal letters.

In its ruling, the Advertising Standards Authority said the use of the word "agency”' in the company title and the abbreviation to ''IPA" throughout the document may have caused recipients to assume it was from an agency associated with the IPO.

“We understood however that no relationship existed between the IPO and the advertiser [IPA],” it said.