By Michael Kan
Publication Date: 2026-03-03 21:50:00
A Florida woman is facing time behind bars for harvesting Microsoft product key codes and reselling them at lower prices.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced 52-year-old Heidi Richards had been sentenced to 22 months in prison for selling the unauthorized product key codes through her e-commerce company, Trinity Software Distribution.
Richards trafficked in Microsoft certificate of authenticity (COA) labels, which are typically found on software product boxes. The labels can also contain a product key to activate the software, such as Windows, making them quite valuable to illicit resellers.
Richards “paid co-conspirators millions of dollars for thousands of genuine, standalone Microsoft COA labels at prices significantly lower than the retail price of the associated software,” the DOJ said. “Richards and her employees harvested product key codes from the labels, then sold them in bulk to her customers,” which violates a law prohibiting the…