1. It is entirely possible that "it took a year to tell me that this trademark was registered." According to Article 28 of the Trademark Law, “the Trademark Office shall complete the review of a trademark application for registration within nine months from the date of receipt of the trademark registration application documents.” The 9 months here do not include various mailing times, announcements, notices, and correction times. Therefore, it is entirely possible for a trademark to take nearly a year to receive an examination decision from the Trademark Office. 2. There is a blank period in the trademark database. When applying, the agency cannot determine whether someone else has applied first. It takes a certain amount of time for the Trademark Office to enter the trademark application information into the database and announce it after receiving the trademark application. During this period, there may be some trademark applications that have been submitted but cannot be found in the system. This period of time is called the "blank period". Therefore, when an agency helps you check whether a trademark can be registered, it cannot verify the prior trademark that is in the blank period. Some agencies (such as ours) will conduct a blank period review after helping customers submit applications in order to judge the success rate in advance and help customers consider review or re-registration. Your agency may not have done this work, so it only informed you that someone had preempted the trademark a year later when the trademark was actually rejected. This situation can only be said to be imprudent, but it is not squatting. 3. The judgment of trademark similarity is subjective. Everyone may have different judgments on whether two trademarks are similar, visually similar, and likely to cause confusion. Even within the Trademark Office, there are often different opinions during examination. Therefore, your agency may not think the two trademarks are similar when applying, but the judgment made by the Trademark Office during review is different from your agency’s. For such a controversial trademark, it is possible to obtain registration through rejection review (probably the "appeal" you mentioned). To sum up, using agents to register trademarks is a common method used by companies today. However, some companies will use some means to register different types of trademarks for companies to purchase in order to make huge profits. Such behavior is prohibited by law. However, the punitive measures for this kind of behavior are not complete yet, so companies must be more selective when choosing agents.