A former Microsoft employee has been sentenced to four
years in prison for stealing £10m-worth of software products and
selling them on.
Finn Contini, a former Microsoft group assistant, was also given
three years’ probation when he gets out, and the Seattle,
Washington court ordered him to forfeit around $1m (£600,000) in
assets.
Contini used Microsoft's online ordering system to receive free
Microsoft software. The company allows employees to receive free
software for business purposes providing they get approval from a
supervisor.
However, Contini and others found a glitch in the ordering
system which allowed them to order thousands of software products
without approval.
The court heard that over a two-and-a-half-year period Contini
ordered 5,400 software products with an estimated retail value of
$17m (£10m).
Contini and the others, who were previously sentenced, illegally
sold a total of 8,700 products, with an estimated retail value of
$32.4m (£19m).
