Dodgy Software Sales Websites

My experience in 2018.

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My comments are general and not Microsoft specific.

There are a number of dodgy sellers who offers keys that are for

  • time limited trials of software
  • corporate licenses good for X number of installs that eventually might get caught up
  • ‘family packs’ often good for 3-5 installs
  • unlimited (actual or practical) licenses that are rarely if ever caught
  • individual keys that have been ‘stolen’ and won’t even register
  • OEM keys that only work on a specific vendors computers often only on specific models.

It is sometimes possible to buy legitimate licenses for old versions of software that will go out of support comparatively early. For purists, an analogy would be a ‘box’ of Office 2010 sitting on a shop shelf nobody wants and is marked down.

For Windows this site may provide useful guidance.

There does not seem to be a similar site for Office, and Office is more convoluted as there are versions sold as one time purchases as well as the newer subscription model although there are ways (version dependent) to check the expiration date if one applies. This MS site has some answers for the curious for the 365 version.

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AFAIK you can still buy a version of Office (I bought Home & Student 2016) and keep that for a long as you want to avoid annual subscriptions.

But you have to be careful - my laptop died and I could not re-install my Office 2013 product as it was a download rather than a CD.

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Always keep a backup, and then a backup of the backup :wink:

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Some of these are good alternatives to the Microsoft suite, depending on use and requirements. Many are covered here…

I used to be a long time Microsoft Office user and found that one pays for many things I didn’t really need (a lot of functionality within say Word which was never used when leaving past employment). We find that the open source/free versions meet almost all our needs, and when it doesn’t, we usually find that there are workarounds (such as temporarily using another free suite that does)…or work out that we don’t need to really use it.

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Um, quick sanity check, how do you know that this message is not the scam? If you have reason to believe that it is genuine then maybe you can contact Microsoft support for confirmation.

If I received this message out of the blue, I would call it a scam. :wink:

Maybe they sold you some kind of limited-time, trial licence. At that price it may be cheaper to get scammed again i.e. cheaper than paying Microsoft annually. (This comment not to be taken too seriously.)

This isn’t really relevant though. You can run LibreOffice under Microsoft Windows. Whether you want to do that probably depends on how sophisticated your needs are (e.g. are you frequently using incredibly niche whizz-bang features that either don’t exist in LibreOffice or aren’t compatible with Microsoft Office?) and how much interoperability with other people you require (e.g. if you are mainly creating documents for your own personal purposes then you don’t care whether the same document works with Microsoft Office v. if your employment requires collaborative working on documents and everyone else is using Microsoft Office then you will eventually run into trouble with a document - but then in that case your employer should be paying for a valid Microsoft Office licence for you).

There are other topics in this forum that explore these issues in more detail.

If you count the Android operating system inside a gazillion phones then Linux is the most commonly used operating system in the world. :wink:

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Perhaps stepping in, I considered that

implied the software stopped working as I interpreted it. Perhaps that interpretation was an overstep. If it did not stop working (eg Microsoft did not disable the installation) yours is an insightful take.

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Either way, if this is a legitimate demand by Microsoft for payment then it doesn’t hurt to confirm that via some offline means.

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The message was not a scam. It was a request from Microsoft to install genuine Microsoft products. I did purchase a dodgy product. Microsoft took two years to deactivate my Microsoft Office, which is amazing, but perhaps they are now doing this more often.

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Our Office 2016 copies are only downloads and I have had no problems downloading it from the MS Office website to reinstall it.

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Thanks to @Fred123’s reminder,

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As they become aware of licences that have been stolen, copied and shared, pirated in other words they have a system where the licence is added to a database and checked when updates are accessed.

They can take a bit of time before MS actually determine when a licence has been misused, in your case 2 years. Just as a further complication the licence may have been legit but purchased in place where the usage was only for that locale eg Russia.

Russian licences for MS products are often very cheap compared to Australia. If MS become aware of this type of usage they will also block that key until the owner is able to confirm they still reside in the required locale or that they have moved from that locale since buying the product.

Anyway if you pay peanuts for a current MS product that normally here costs a lot more, you are buying a non legit product. There is a risk that the product key will not work immediately or it may take some time for it to fail which could vary from days to years.

Win 10 they are softer on but for the others MS is very strict.

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You could always consider Office 2019 from a reputable dealer. Then again, dark mode is coming soon to Office 2016 so that’ll keep me happy for a while. (I also for some reason prefer Office Professional, but there are plenty of legitimate deals that will enable you to buy that for a reasonable price.)

I also still have my Office 97 box/CDs/manual sitting on the shelf in case of Y2K.

This is because you are no longer the operating system customer, but the product; Microsoft expects to make money from users of Windows 10 through its store and through advertising/search.

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Welcome to the forum.

I have moved your post and replies to an existing relevant thread about similar experiences. There is also similar discussion on another thread counterfeit products on eBay and Amazon.

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I am sorry if this has been answered and I missed it but how can you check before buying if a vendor is selling genuine keys?

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Unfortunately, you can’t. No vendor will reveal the specifics of the key(s) they are selling. Only once you have purchased the key can you check its veracity.

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That’s why it best to go through reputable and local (Australian) licence sellers.

Looking online, foreign onsellers of unknown reliability (could be fraudsters selling the same key over and over again…using key generators to make new keys etc) are selling licences significantly cheaper than reputable Australian onsellers. The foreign onsellers are very much…send your money and then trust us…while Australian onsellers one will have better recourse when something does go wrong. A foreign seller will possibly disappear before problems arise leaving a consumer with and expensive ‘bargain’.

The fraudsters also possibly won’t be paying royalties back to the software developer either.

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A download is just typically an install package file. Once downloaded you run it.
So I keep all my download files in a folder and back them up to external disk, together with any associated things like emails with activate keys, on a regular basis.

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This type of differential pricing is itself a scam.

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And when they use your credit card for other purchases once you hand the details over.

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