You rarely hear about this kind of thing: She was sentenced to prison for stealing stickers that most people consider worthless, and not just for a month or two.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida announced the sentencing of Heidi Richards, a 52-year-old woman from Brandon, Florida, who was found guilty of conspiring to sell counterfeit Microsoft Certificates of Authenticity (COAs). Heidi Richards, a Brandon, Florida resident, was sentenced to 22 months in a U.S. federal prison and fined $50,000 for her involvement in the fraud. Prosecutors say Richards operated an e-commerce business called Trinity Software Distribution, which she used to purchase millions of dollars’ worth of genuine, standalone Microsoft COA labels at a significant discount to the retail price of the associated software.
COA labels are small stickers containing Microsoft product key codes that can be used to activate products sold on physical media, such as Windows 10 and MS Office. Richards and her employees allegedly collected product keys from tens of thousands of stickers, entered them manually into Excel documents, and then sold them in bulk to the company’s customers. According to federal law, COA stickers cannot be sold separately from the license and hardware they are intended to accompany.
The illegal label trade allegedly took place between July 2018 and January 2023. During this period, Richards’s company allegedly transferred $5,148,181.50 to the original Texas-based supplier, although it is unclear exactly how much profit was made. The indictment lists a series of large label purchases over approximately five and a half years, with the largest purchase being worth around $100,000. However, with Richards already convicted and the fraud exposed, it seems that the license reselling game is over.
Who would have thought that a sticker could generate so much illegal profit? Or even several thousand dollars? One might say that many small amounts add up to a large sum, but that’s beside the point.
Source: PCGamer, Justice.gov
