Counterfeit Windows 7 Ultimate on eBay

[rougebev]

Hi.
Mick from Anna Bay Computers here. Just wanted to let the community know about all the counterfeit software for sale lately.
We decided to make a purchase to get some of this counterfeit software, so we can expose them as fakes. We bought Windows 7 Ultimate and Office 2007 Professional for $192.00. First Windows 7 Ultimate, in what looked like genuine packaging at a glance. Alarm bells started ringing as we removed the plastic to get a clearer look at the COA, the print is sub-standard on the package and COA, the metal strip is not interwoven into the paper and is silver not red and says Genuine not Our Passion. Then we opened the container and compared the Product Key Sticker against a Genuine Sticker and it is at least 50% different. To the disc's, as you can see in my video, very poor construction. The hologram is not built in to the plastic and is glued on and can be peeled away. We sent images of the products and COA's to Microsoft and they aggreed it was counterfeit software.
To top off our experiment we contacted the seller with the video in this article and got a refund no questions asked!!
So it's a case of buyer be aware, hope this helps make your Windows 7 purchase easier.

Links to videos me made:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y55qQES64Ps
Windows 7 Ultimatehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlEsZdwuGcM
Office 2007 Pro
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300425460082&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT
Pictures of fake COA's on my advert for Windows 7 here

Cheers
Mick

[moonlyte]

please explain who, except microsoft, suffers in any way.

It's clear that you have not given much thought before asking this question.

Everyone in the demand and supply chains suffer.

Retailers suffer. A seller peddling illegitimate software for 10-50% of what it costs retail takes business away from retailers who have spent their hard earned money to buy legitimate stock. The fake seller has no right to own stock, but can produce and profit from countless fakes.

Illegitimate software(or anything else) means less business for manufacturers and distributors of legitimate products.

Buyers suffer. Pirated software serial keys eventually get blocked, and the software stops working, or stops allowing updates, or the manufacturer won't provide support for the pirated software.

If you call people who care about piracy "software vigilantes", then consider yourself a piracy advocate.

I am outta here.

[9792alston]

Yes,
I can see your point. Retailers of genuine software probably do lose a certain amount of business. But at the end of the day retail is a price driven industry. People (myself included) will always buy the cheaper version of the same article. And BTW, have you ever copied and burnt a software cd or dvd? Or downloaded a song off a P2P programme? I cant help but notice the silence that ensues whenever I ask this question of the self righteous software vigilante mob.

[fredoz]

I bought W7 Ultimate 32 & 64 about a year ago, seemed OK to me, registered OK with MS.  Now just recently I have a black screen on start up with messages about illegal copies and so on.  While I can't find the original information about the seller, I recognised the auction page layout, it is still happening.  I have reported these listing to eBay, the first few were removed, the follow up reportings have been ignored.

Usually sellers have little or no past sales record, but one enterprising seller even set up feedback.

After reading above messages I believe eBay is not doing enough to prevent these forgery sellers.  As such I believe they are being party to the offences and should be charged along with the originating criminals.

[rogespeed]

Some of them are early "Engineering samples" not for home user - technically legit but not licencee transferable and/or now can not be activated.

I got stung via another auction site - no refund from the Seller , just lame excuses

[mikegreenhill]

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to post here.

It's obviously happening again.

I'm restarting this thread in the hope others will search and avoid an obvious scam.

Windows 7 is presumably popular due to XP no longer being supported.  I've just purchased WIN 7 ULT (Brand New - Unopened - Haha).  Box had been shrink wrapped to look new but the security seal was broken. Hologram was glued to disks and peeled off easily. You can guess the rest.

There are regular sellers popping up in "Hobart" but actually based in Malaysia offering "NEW -Unopene" Microsoft products and huge discounts. All user details are similar: Active on Ebay from around October/November 2011. 1 or 2 positive reviews (initally) followed by a quick sucession of very positive reviews since May 2014. Payment is always Paypal - with a 3 day turn around and 8-14 days delivery. 

My package originated from China, which would explain the delivery times.

I will obviously following this up and will post any reults here.

Mike

[rogespeed]

The "trans-pacific rip off"  whereby MS stand-alone software is doubled in price compared with the States , just because it is sold in Australia , adds to Buyer desperation for cost effective solutions

(The pricing will be interesting when  we are forced to purchase their cars from c 2017 )

[jason.campbellxx]

Buy from retail store.

But it's good stuff for reporting the seller, but what do you know, the source needs to be stopped, not the effects. Get the source. 1-2 sources, thousands of sellers.

If I were M$ I would go for thousands of sellers, each to court, make mega buck$, keep source alive. More money 🙂

[9792alston]

Welcome to the real world.

[davewil1964]

You have replied to an EIGHT YEAR old post. About obsolete, unsupported software.

Well done.