Be Suspicious Anywhere You See a Cheap Key Even if you luck out and your new key does work forever, purchasing these keys is unethical. We all know it: There’s no way a $12 Windows product key was obtained legitimately. Or, you may be rewarding people who abuse programs set up to help students and encouraging the shutdown of these programs. By purchasing them, you may be supporting criminals who steal credit card numbers. It all depends on where the key originally came from, and you’ll never know where that was.

Your key may never work in the first place, it may work for a month, or it may never be blacklisted at all.

That’s just one anecdote, but it’s our experience. So it stopped working, and we’d have to buy a new key. It was probably purchased with a stolen credit card number, and it was eventually blacklisted on Microsoft’s servers. In other words, at some point in that year, the key we purchased was flagged as bad by Microsoft. After that, Windows started saying we “may be a victim of software piracy.” Our Windows license was no longer “ genuine.” We stuck it in a virtual machine, and it worked for about a year. We once bought a Windows 7 key for about $15 from one of these websites.

But Do They Work? A legitimate Windows 10 key would never have issues with “volume activation.” An especially bad website might even steal the credit card number you use to buy the key and use it to start the credit card fraud game anew. On really sketchy websites, you may just be purchasing a completely fake key or an already-known key that was used to pirate Windows on multiple systems that has been blocked by Microsoft. Other keys may be “volume license” keys, which are not supposed to be resold individually. Some keys may be education keys intended for students but obtained fraudulently. When the credit cards are reported as stolen and the chargebacks occur, Microsoft deactivates the keys, and those Windows installations are no longer activated-but the criminal gets away with the money people paid for them. A criminal acquires some credit card numbers, purchases a bunch of Windows keys online, and sells them through third-party websites at a cut rate. Other keys could have been purchased with stolen credit card numbers. For example, Windows keys were once much cheaper in China. They may be legitimate, but they were sold for cheaper in other countries. These are referred to as “gray market” keys. Some of these keys just come from other countries where Windows licenses are cheaper.

The websites selling cheap Windows 10 and Windows 7 keys aren’t getting legitimate retail keys straight from Microsoft.

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