A Florida woman was sentenced to 22 months in prison for running a massive years-long scheme to traffic thousands of stolen Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity (COA) labels.
52-year-old Heidi Richards (also known as Heidi Hastings, Heidi Shaffer, and Heidi Williams), who operated an e-commerce business called Trinity Software Distribution, was also ordered to pay a $50,000 fine.
COA labels are small stickers that authenticate software and carry unique product key codes used to activate products distributed on physical media, such as Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office productivity suite.
