[gvurrdon]

Excellent tale. It is sadly unsurprising that users get so upset about software they don't pay for.

If I may be permitted a brief comment, I recall several years ago a situation where we received complaints that our rather computationally-intensive software was running on some people's laptops without them having installed it, rapidly draining their batteries and heating the machines up, and what did we think we were playing at hijacking their systems?

It turned out that the culprit was a modified version of our software for a distributed computing project that would apply the credit generated to one particular account, presumably belonging to the user who had distributed the cracked version. IIRC (though I may be mistaken) they were distributing it bundled with some other cracked Windows software.