Coveted IP empires like Nike, Chanel, Toyota, the NBA, and Grumpy Cat Limited have spent five years suing companies that don't exist. Since 2020, brand holders have filed 8,747 federal lawsuits against online storefronts with names like "AMXYFBK(7-15 days delivery)⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐" and "Lightning Deals of Today Prime(JINFFVB)." We pulled 1,197 of these defendants from the federal dockets, courtesy of the Free Law Project's Court Listener archive. Surprise: Not one of these companies is a registered US business.
They aren't shell companies hiding behind other companies. They're businesses that were never formed. The seller account is the whole operation: the Amazon storefront is the address, the payment processor is the bank, and nothing rolls up to a state filing because nobody needs one to start selling. So when a court receives 200-plus of them on a single complaint, there's no answer to the standard KYB question "which business is this?"
That question doesn't stay in court. It's the first thing a lender or a marketplace asks about anyone it onboards, and the usual answer is to pull the registration. These sellers never file one. They open an account, move product for a season, take the money, and disappear before there's a filing to check. We pulled the data to see what the courts do with that, and what KYB systems do when they try to validate the answer.
In federal court, a "Schedule A" case is a trademark, patent, or copyright suit filed against numerous defendants, often a sealed list of online sellers. The brand holder files a complaint that names dozens to hundreds of defendants, and the court issues a temporary restraining order and serves the defendants by email. The vast majority of defendants don't show up, so the court finds in favor of the plaintiff by default, then a platform like Amazon must freeze the named storefronts and any funds it holds for them. Eric Goldman at Santa Clara Law has documented this litigation pattern at length in A SAD Scheme of Abusive Intellectual Property Litigation (2024).
CourtListener's public archive of federal dockets contains 8,747 of these cases filed since January 2020. Volume has grown from 500 cases in 2020 to 2,833 in 2025, with 644 filed in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Eighty-seven percent of these cases are filed in a single court, the Northern District of Illinois.
The plaintiffs are public, well-resourced IP holders like Nike, Dyson, Toyota, the NBA, Chanel, Harley-Davidson, and the coveted IP empire of Grumpy Cat Limited.
A handful of "XYZ Corporation" and "ABC Corporation" placeholders in the docket index indicate that even the brand identity of the plaintiff is kept under seal in some filings. The defendants, by design, are not.
We pulled the actual Schedule A attachments from CourtListener's free public cache for thirty-three of these cases, extracting 1,197 distinct seller names. The defendants fall into four buckets:
Generated handle strings. ALBAAY, KEGIRLOM, BOLANQ, YCW231212, A133, FXZZ DIY, JINFFVB. All-caps or alphanumeric mixtures that read as platform-assigned identifiers, not business names.
Romanized Chinese provincial registrations. taizhouluqiaoyuxinyaodianzishangwu parses as "Taizhou Luqiao District Yuxin Yao E-commerce"; luoyangshipengwudaoluyunshu parses as "Luoyang Pengwu Logistics." These are Chinese e-commerce companies whose romanized internal names became the Amazon storefront handle.
Embedded marketing copy. "SXMURP Black Friday Deals 2024 50% Off." "AMXYFBK(7-15 days delivery)⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐". "HanYuWang ⚡Black Friday Deals⚡7-15 Days." Not names so much as storefront listings preserved verbatim, ⭐s and all.
Pseudo-English brand-shaped names. Lin Decor, Warm Mats, RugRipple, MatCraft, CozyRugs, ArtMatGallery. These are plausible-sounding small-business names with no corresponding US Secretary of State filing.
Again, not one of these is a registered US business. The category they share is a platform listing: an account on Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, eBay, or another similar surface that's registered under whatever handle the operator chose. When the platform seizes a wave of handles, new ones inevitably emerge under different names.
So how do you answer: is this online storefront a real business? There's no clean answer from a platform handle alone. The string was never an entity name. It's just whatever the seller typed into an onboarding form. Asking any name-matching engine to map this storefront to a corporate identity would be asking it to invent a relationship that doesn't exist.
When the handle gives you nothing, the usual move is to demand papers. But registration is the easiest part of a business to fake. Anyone can stand up an LLC and pull an EIN in an afternoon, which proves someone filled out a form, not that a business is real. What's actually hard to fake is what a real business leaves behind without trying: money moving through it, a storefront customers walk into, reviews that took years to build, inspection and licensing records filed by agencies with no stake in the seller's story. Registration is the floor; the signals that carry weight are the ones you can't fake on a form.
That's the idea behind our identity graph. It works from whatever attributes a caller brings, and it leans on the evidence that's hardest to fake: where a business actually operates, the revenue moving through it, the public records that pile up around anything real. Give it a working Etsy shop with no LLC and it can still surface the business. Give it nothing but "*AMXYFBK(7-15 days delivery)*⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐" and the only honest response is the one a registry check can't manage: no verifiable business here, validate another way or escalate. The dangerous answer is the confident one, stitched together from wherever the data is densest.
Editor's note: Any Schedule A defendant offended that we've called them nonexistent can mail proof of their corporate existence to Enigma HQ. We'll send a hat, and eat one of our own.