Buying Software on Ebay? – be carefull, Piracy lurks around sadly

Ebay and its competitors in variours countries are great places to buy merchandise for a nice price, as well as great and perfectly legit small independant online stores. At the same time Piracy lurks around big time on sites like Ebay USA & Ebay SWEDEN etcetera. In Sweden, Europe there are equivalent websites just like EBAY SWEDEN called Tradera and Blocket, where people buy and sell merchandise. In Swedish media and no doubt in other countries as well, Police and other authorities and maybe the websites themselves, do what they can from time to time, in trying to stop the scammers selling you bad goods. But we are very much on our own on sites like these.

You look for a great deal on a Software such as CorelDRAW, Painter, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and so forth – first thought though would be to “keep away”.  Many software packages being sold on Ebay are many times sadly sold by scammers who cant care less quite frankly. Scammers like to get your money and done with it.

Many times when I go online to the great official CorelDRAW family Community www.coreldraw.com, I read and hear about people who have sadly been scammed by Scammers selling false software packages. Box versions with DVDs and all but with false serial numbers. People go online to the community and tell how their software can not be registered. After a while it comes to light they have been sold bad goods.  And some tell stories on how some scammers have Rankings saying they are great and very positive sellers, and still are just scammers. This is nothing new unfortunately. It happens all the time.

It is just sad it keeps going on. Many people who buy these scammed goods are ordinary people who either buy for personal use or small family businesses for a sum of money that could be put into other positive use instead of the hands of scammers. Mostly it seems larger companies wont buy from Ebay for Software and instead solve this on officially recogniced retail/online stores and suppliers.

Be vary on where you buy your software, and if the price is Super good, its mostly to good to be true prices. BUT scammers on the other hand could easily sell you the same bad piracy goods for official retail prices and make packages look really professional. So DONT go for the price. Instead only go via legitimate retailers, big or small. And why not, if you find the store & price you like, why not go online on coreldraw.com community which is an official Corel community and ask ordinary users around the world, and ask if they know about the retailer.

And why not contact COREL or ADOBE and ask if they may know about the retailer.

More read: It started on complaints on software membership when it really showed to be a pirated copy bought on Ebay. Read the thread and be careful >

Attached pictures published with permission of the photographer.
This is how well made a pirated copy can look like. And what to look out for to see its not a real copy. Compare these pics with real products from Corel.

Stefan Lindblad
Illustrator & graphic designer
CorelDRAW & Photo-Paint beta testerCorelDRAW Master
Corel PHOTO-PAINT featured user