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2 People Sentenced for Selling Counterfeit Software from China

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California has announced that on April 25, 2011, Steven Stoyanoff and Michael Swedlow were sentenced to serve 15 months and 8 months in prison, respectively, for trafficking in counterfeit Microsoft software.…

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Stoyanoff and Swedlow admitted that they wired money to China as payment for counterfeit Microsoft software and that from July 2005 to March 2009, they sold $500,000 of the counterfeit software. They sold the counterfeit software over the Internet using the company names “Wireless Now Computers” and “Whitebox Computers,” and mailed the software to customers throughout the U.S., falsely representing that the software was genuine. Stoyanoff and Swedlow were ordered to pay restitution of $590,762 to Microsoft and their Internet customers, forfeit $500,000, and pay a fine of $5,000 each.