I read about Advent Product Development in a local newspaper and was interested in having an invention I had come up with mass produced. I checked on the Better Business Bureau website and they checked out OK, so I called their Westchester, IL office and made an appointment to meet with them to discuss my idea. On August 4, I met with their rep, John E. Alberts, about representing me for my Multi Holiday Lights. I was interested in bringing my invention to the market and obtaining a licensing agreement with a manufacturer. At that meeting, John told me that their company would evaluate my invention for the sum of $995 to see if there was a market for it as he was not sure they would want to accept it. He told me that they turned down more inventions than they accepted. I went ahead and paid him the money, thinking they were a reputable company
Several weeks later, John called me and said that his bosses had agreed to accept me as a client. We made an appointment to meet again so we could discuss the next step. At that meeting, I was given a big black binder that had all kinds of miscellaneous research about how many strings of holiday lights were sold in America, etc. John said the $995 covered the cost of doing all this research.
It was at this point that he told me that in order to progress to the next step filing a patent, preparing a marketing brochure, preparing a press release, going to trade show and sending all this information to various light manufacturers in America, they would need an additional $9245. I put this charge on a credit card, as I did not have that much money available to me. John told me at this point that my file would be transferred to their headquarters in South Carolina and I would deal only with them from this point on.
Over the 18 months I received miscellaneous vague letters from a variety of people from the Advent headquarters in Pawleys Island, SC. They gave me very vague status reports of how they were progressing. They prepared a very rudimentary sketch of my idea or a marketing brochure. It was incorrectly drawn and I had to ask them to correct it. They had an attorney (Richard Goldstein) file a patent on my behalf, but I never spoke to him. He never called me to explain my invention to him and never requested my input on how the invention worked. I tried calling him several times, but was never permitted to speak to him. When the patent finally was filed, it appeared to me that it was a design patent even though I was promised it would be a utility patent. It is my understanding that design patents are useless and worthless. Again, I tried calling the attorney and was not put through to him. When I brought this up to Advent, I was assured that he was an excellent attorney and my patent was valid.
Finally, in the early summer of I received a letter from Advent telling me that they had done all that they could and they were closing my file and would no longer be representing me. It was at that point that I realized I had been totally scammed by this company. They took me for $10,240 and laughed all the way to the bank.
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