Posted at 12:00 a.m.
“Tricks”, “lies galore”, “tortuous answers”. The president of the Fédération des inventors du Québec, Christian Varin, is found guilty of fraud after robbing clients of more than $1 million by misleading them to believe that he was drafting patent applications for them to protect their creations.
The 64-year-old has, in all likelihood, never succeeded in obtaining a single patent for the approximately 500 people he and his intellectual property protection firm have represented since 2014, said judge Alexandre Dalmau, of the Court of Quebec.
Christian Varin is an “impostor who exploits public credulity”, a “charlatan of the XXIand century”, launched the magistrate. He paid more than $127,000 to Google between 2017 and 2018 to have his federation’s name appear at the top of Google searches when inventors asked about the patent process.
Once contact was established with his clients, he met them at their homes or in public places. He charged them $695 to $2,495 to “internationally search” their invention and file a provisional patent application. In some cases, he went so far as to charge $200 to pay US taxes, when the entire process cost him barely $65.
Worse, the analysis report he subsequently provided to his clients was, in most cases, a “copy-and-paste” of the same sentence with the “same grammatical error reproduced” from document to document. other.
“Insult to intelligence”
The way he twists the words is an “insult to the intelligence,” the judge said, reading for nearly two hours Wednesday from his hugely fleshed-out 56-page (252 paragraph) decision.
We accuse [Christian Varin] of taking a white horse, painting it black lines and selling it as a zebra. The evidence now shows that it is indeed a horse. He defends himself by continuing to claim that it is a zebra, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Judge Alexandre Dalmau, in his decision
Mr. Varin said he offered patent application services for a fraction of the price of what specialized firms cost. He claimed to have a whole team at his disposal, while he was the only person behind the company, which “has nothing to do with a federation”, noted the judge.
The only thing he was actually doing was applying for a “provisional patent”, a document that has absolutely no legal use if a formal patent application – much more expensive, complex, and requiring the expertise of a real patent agent – is not filed within 12 months.
However, Mr. Varin was “simply incapable of obtaining patents”. “He has no intention of doing it. He has neither the skills nor the capacity to do so,” hammered the judge several times.
Simple acknowledgment of receipt
Mr. Varin’s blatant incompetence, however, did not prevent him from deceiving his clients, to whom he provided a banal acknowledgment from the US Patent Office confirming that he had filed a provisional patent application on their behalf. However, the documents he produced at great expense were never examined. No technical drawing was analyzed since no official request was ever provided: “We can write anything, an acknowledgment of receipt is sent” by default by the Patent Office system, the judge summarized.
” Customers [croyaient] sincerely having protected their invention. »
In the best of cases, Mr. Varin was content to do a search by typing “a few words in a database” free online. His research was so sketchy and poorly done that, for a client who wanted to patent a device for a swimming pool, he provided a search result for pool games. ).
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, PRESS ARCHIVES
The Inventors Pavilion, in Shefford, in 2018
About 1.3 million of the 1.4 million in turnover he fraudulently billed his victims was “cannibalized” to the Pavillon des Inventeurs, a huge “club for inventors” he had built in Shefford, but which is now a “cottage” that he tries to rent on Airbnb using a false name.
The fraudster also claimed to have created a $15,000 relief fund to help inventors market their products, but he never paid a penny of that amount.
Christian Varin should know his sentence next February.
The alarm bell rang in 2017
In 2017, it was one of the competitors of the Fédération des inventors du Québec, the former police officer Daniel Paquette, president of Inventarium, who sounded the alarm. Mr. Paquette himself conducted an extremely documented investigation into the practices of Christian Varin, recounting the desperate situation experienced by hundreds of victims. He contacted police forces, the Consumer Protection Office, and even took steps to present his investigation findings to Prime Minister François Legault, to no avail. Even after Mr. Varin was charged with criminal fraud and targeted by a class action, he continued to fool his clients. Mr. Paquette now says he is “happy and relieved” that the judge has found him guilty, but “very bitter and disappointed” that he has raged for so long without anyone being able to stop him.