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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