KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Thirteen years ago, HSI Kansas City received a lead from the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center about someone in Kansas City sending out illegal Microsoft product key codes. The suspect would later be identified as Casey Ross.
“The investigation led us to identify he had illicitly distributed about 35,000 of those Microsoft product key codes, which is an estimated retail value of about $13 million in a year,” HSI Supervisory Special Agent Scott Titus said.
The codes would then be sold to wholesalers and large-scale distributors throughout the United States and placed on counterfeit Microsoft products. Those codes make phony Microsoft products seem legitimate and put personal information at risk…