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11 charged over piracy busts

17 September 2004 15:16 by James "Dela" Delahunty | 3 comments

11 people from across the United States were indicted on Wednesday for piracy offenses, following massive piracy busts. It was the largest seizure of counterfeit Microsoft products so far with the estimated value of the Microsoft products reaching $80 million. The series of raids came from a two year investigation into a US-wide piracy ring. Another $7 million worth of pirated Symnatec and Adobe software was also uncovered. �Operation Digital Marauder' involved the use of three search warrants and eleven arrests in Washington, Texas and California.

The suspects were allegedly involved in illegal media replication, printing of counterfeit documentation and distribution of counterfeit software. Some Microsoft products found included Microsoft Office, Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server. Tobias Grace and Sanh Thai, two of the suspects, allegedly ran a counterfeit site in Los Angeles where they illegally copied Abode and Symnatec products. The FBI raided the site and seized the equipment in April this year. They contacted a San Francisco printer, Thanh Tuong, who copied the software documents from Microsoft and other products. These documents were delivered to a number of customers, including Arnica Grace, Tobias Grace's sister, for distribution in Texas.

Microsoft has been aware of the scam for about three years now, as people had called for tech support, to find out that they had purchased the pirated software. Company investigators assisted the FBI in its investigation. Tobias Grace was alleged to have illegally obtained goods from Microsoft workers who abused Microsoft's internal ordering systems to obtain the products for virtually nothing.

Source:
The Register

Permalink to this article

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Discuss this article!
mystic (Member) 20 September 2004 5:00
hey when will they investugate ebay for all the software thats backed up I mean you can go there and buy poser5 for as little as $35 and thats kewl with everyone even thou all you get is a burnt cd with a key code and a crack disk... something isnt right with that. the feds can find a cd that isnt real but they cant find 6 ft Suadia in the desert dragging around a dyasliss machine.. go figure yyeah our country is safer over burnt cds but the real terroest are still out there and all we do is buste little jimmy because he shared a game with someone else. which is worse the fact that we pay to much for the game or that they dont write any encrytion on it to safe guard the soft ware from being copied..... [ + quote]
mystic (Member) 20 September 2004 5:00
hey when will they investugate ebay for all the software thats backed up I mean you can go there and buy poser5 for as little as $35 and thats kewl with everyone even thou all you get is a burnt cd with a key code and a crack disk... something isnt right with that. the feds can find a cd that isnt real but they cant find 6 ft Suadia in the desert dragging around a dyasliss machine.. go figure yyeah our country is safer over burnt cds but the real terroest are still out there and all we do is buste little jimmy because he shared a game with someone else. which is worse the fact that we pay to much for the game or that they dont write any encrytion on it to safe guard the soft ware from being copied..... [ + quote]
Soulreave (Junior Member) 25 October 2004 7:29
i would understand maybe 4-5$ for a cd of that nature with a crack but 35?!@ [ + quote]