Software Scam – teamsoftwareusa.net

I just heard about a too good to be true type of software offer. MS Office full version for $60, when it regularly sells for like $400-500. Apparently the justification was that it was downloaded only, and you did not get the packaging and CD backup, thus saving the cost. I would guess that packaging costs less than $5, so that made me suspicious. Anyhow, about 90% of the rest of this post was copied from me email reply after investigating the site in question.

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Looks like its actually a rather large, sophisticated scam. That domain name, www.teamsoftwareusa.net was only registered on Oct 31st of this year, and was only registered for 1 year. People who do scams often only register a domain for 1 year (the minimum) b/c they only plan to use it for a couple of months and then the scam is up and they use a different domain name. I tried doing searches on them but it appears as though there isn’t even really a company name. So, I tried taking some text from their site:

“…in selling the products for private purposes only! You will not be able to get a technical support and different rebates from the manufacturer. Updates are available for the most of our products (you may ask our support…”

and searched on that in Google. What you’ll find is alot of different websites with different domains that are all essentially the same site. Looks like they just recycle the same site and keep moving it to a different domain every couple months to avoid being caught. They also do some SEO tricks to spam the search engines so you won’t find anything bad if you search on their name, just a bunch of other software sites, none of which actually mention them. The fact that they move their URL every few months is more than enough to make me worry. They also don’t seem to have a phone number on their site, also questionable. Lastly, the site says:

“We offer the software for downloading only, it means that you do not receive a fancy package, a printed manual and license that actually aggregate the largest part of the retail price.”

In reading that again, it says you DONT GET A LICENSE. Unless I’m mistaken, it is the license to use that software that makes it a legal version versus an illegal version. I’m pretty sure its a scam – smells like a duck, walks like a duck…

The name of the www.teamsoftwareusa.net site is “Discounter Online”, but the domain is registered to the company name of “Software Online”, neither of which match the URL. The domain is registered to Peter Buckley of Mill Valley, California. I also found the generic names “Software Now” and “Downloadable Software”, each of which was in Google’s index but the sites no longer exist. Other possible domains in this scam:

http://bigaaron.info
http://oemgiant.com
http://worldsoftwareshop.com
http://expansionsoft.com
http://www.countysoft.com

and possibly also:

http://oem-software-reseller.info/
http://indiware.net/
http://oem-software-house.com/
http://maxsofts.com/
http://newworldsoft.com/
http://oem-software-store.com/
http://protoolsworld.com/
http://fairtradebiz.com/
http://windows-xp.biz/
http://soft4download.com
http://pc-sale.info

In fact, the www.expansionsoft.com site is a different $50 template away from being the exact same site (same content and text) as the www.teamsoftwareusa.net site.

Related Links:

http://castlecops.com/p555942-Is_This_Site_Genuine_it_seems_impossible.html

http://osministry.com/forum/index.php?s=240d02f1cb9de224fcc776dfbb5eb24d&showtopic=1412

http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t341971.html

http://www.epinions.com/msg/show_~threads/cat_id_~22/id_~5683/forum_id_~145

*** Please note that I purposely did not link to the sketchy sites in question, as that would make my site look like a “friend” of theirs in Google’s eyes – not something that I want to appear to be…