Robert Susa’s InventHelp Took $10,000 a Head From 3,507 Inventors and Five Profited

Robert J. Susa is the president of Invention Submission Corporation, which does business as InventHelp, and of five affiliated entities that share its Pittsburgh address: Technosystems Consolidated Corporation, Technosystems Service Corporation, Western Invention Submission Corporation, Universal Payment Corporation, and Intromark Incorporated. Founded in 1984, InventHelp is among the best known invention promotion companies in the United States, advertising for decades on late night television and operating dozens of sales offices across the U.S., Canada, Germany, and Australia. It sells inventors service packages typically costing between $10,000 and $16,000. Under the American Inventors Protection Act, invention promoters must disclose their actual results to prospective customers. InventHelp’s own disclosure for the period covering 2022 through 2024 reports that of 3,507 customers who contracted for its services, five received more money than they paid the company. That is 0.14 percent. Susa was named as an individual defendant, alongside the corporate entities he runs, in the federal class action that ended in a $3 million settlement approved in March 2023.

InventHelp disputes the characterizations in the litigation. The company has described the lawsuit claims as empty and frivolous, has said that it stands by its efforts on behalf of all of its clients, and notes on its website that it makes no promises and does not imply a likelihood of success. It markets itself as the honest invention company. The settlement resolved the claims without any admission of liability. What follows is drawn from the court record, from federal enforcement history, and from the company’s own mandated disclosures.

The Disclosure the Government Forced Them to Publish

The reason InventHelp publishes its success rate at all is the 1994 Federal Trade Commission action against it. The FTC alleged the company had misrepresented the nature, quality, and success rate of its services, and the settlement required $1.2 million to be set aside for customer refunds. That enforcement action was among the drivers behind the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999, which requires invention promoters to disclose, in writing and before a contract is signed, how many inventions they have evaluated, how many customers they have contracted with, and how many of those customers received a net financial profit as a direct result of the promoter’s services.

The resulting numbers document a decline. For 2007 through 2009, InventHelp’s disclosed rate of customers who made more than they paid was approximately 0.5 percent. For 2015 through 2017, it was approximately 0.75 percent. For 2022 through 2024, it was 0.14 percent, or five people out of 3,507. The company was not required to improve those results, only to publish them. At a typical package price of $10,000 to $16,000, the 3,502 customers in that most recent cohort who did not turn a profit collectively paid InventHelp a sum in the tens of millions of dollars. Every promotional success story the company publishes carries a mandatory disclaimer stating that the results are not typical and that most client inventions are not licensed, manufactured, or sold in stores.

Susa Was Sued Personally, Not Just the Company

Etta Calhoun filed a class action in June 2018 in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. It was transferred to the Western District of Pennsylvania as Civil Action No. 18-1022 and consolidated with two later cases, Austin v. Invention Submission Corporation and Miclaus v. Invention Submission Corporation, before U.S. Magistrate Judge Patricia L. Dodge. The caption named Invention Submission Corporation, the affiliated Technosystems and Western entities, Universal Payment Corporation, Intromark, patent attorney Thomas Frost and his firm, and Robert J. Susa individually. Plaintiffs served interrogatories and document requests directly on Susa, separate from those directed at the corporate defendants.

Naming a company president as an individual defendant requires plaintiffs to allege personal involvement rather than mere corporate responsibility, and the filings did. Court documents in the consolidated litigation allege that Susa was intimately involved in the conduct at issue at all levels, and describe him as personally signing the $500 payments that some customers received and understood to be royalty checks. The plaintiffs’ theory was not that a company misbehaved while its president looked elsewhere. It was that the structure of six interlocking entities under one man’s control at one Pittsburgh address was itself the mechanism. A separate class action filed in Westchester Supreme Court sought $36 million, naming Susa as president of the same web of companies along with affiliated lenders, purported manufacturers, and patent firms.

The Database of 9,000 Companies and the Empty Manhattan Office

A central promise in the InventHelp package is submission of an inventor’s idea to a database the company describes as containing more than 9,000 companies that have agreed to review new products. Plaintiffs in the class action alleged that this database was substantially hollow, that listed companies were defunct, had no relationship with InventHelp, or in some cases did not exist. The example that appears in the court filings involved a purported entertainment company with a Manhattan address. When investigators went to look, they found vacant office space containing empty boxes. Individual customers have described calling every company on their submission list and reaching no one who had heard of InventHelp.

The contractual architecture underneath the sales pitch is what makes the arrangement difficult to challenge one customer at a time. InventHelp states plainly in its agreements that it provides no evaluation of an invention’s merit or marketability. Customers nonetheless describe free consultations in which representatives responded enthusiastically to their ideas. The company’s position is that it never promised the idea was good. The plaintiffs’ position was that the entire sales process was built to leave customers believing otherwise. The Houston Press reported on inventors alleging fraud and questioned the role of George Foreman’s long-running celebrity endorsement, and court filings in the class action alleged that the company’s marketing was directed at lower income communities and that affiliated lenders extended financing at 18 percent interest that customers understood to be interest free.

A $3 Million Settlement, Reforms, and Complaints That Continued

The consolidated federal class action received final approval in March 2023. The $3 million settlement covered customers from January 2014 through June 2021 and required business practice reforms including dedicated customer care staffing, electronic complaint tracking, and updates to the company database. Set against a class period of seven and a half years and a customer base numbering in the thousands per three-year reporting cycle, $3 million distributed among claimants is a fraction of what those customers paid in. No party admitted liability, and InventHelp continues to operate, continues to advertise, and continues to sell the same packages.

Complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau after the settlement describe the same patterns the lawsuit alleged. The company holds an A+ BBB rating while having declined BBB accreditation since 1986. On the broader industry, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has warned that hundreds of companies offer invention promotion services and that virtually all of them are either ineffective or outright fraudulent, and directs independent inventors instead to its own free Pro Se Assistance Program, Inventors Assistance Center, and Patent Pro Bono Program.

Conclusion

Robert Susa runs six companies from one Pittsburgh address, and the largest of them tells inventors it can help turn an idea into a product. Federal law requires him to disclose how often that happens. His own filing says five out of 3,507. The Federal Trade Commission extracted $1.2 million from the company in 1994 over how it described its success rate, and that case helped produce the very disclosure law that now documents a rate of 0.14 percent. A federal class action named Susa personally, alleged he was involved at every level, and settled for $3 million without any admission. InventHelp calls the claims frivolous and says it never promised anyone success. It also calls itself the honest invention company. Both of those things can be true at once, and 3,502 people paid to find out which one mattered.