"You may be a victim of software counterfeiting" notification on Office apps

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"You may be a victim of software counterfeiting" notification on Office apps

Vanchester90

Hello, I have had successfully activated my office 2019 over a year ago and just recently a yellow notification bar appears stating the following: "you may be victim of software counterfeiting etc.". I have tried the method of removing my license key using CMD as administrator and reinstalling my key but it did not remove this notification.

Word, Excel, PPT do not show this notification but only outlook.

any ideas?

Edit: Grammar

dhirhams

Vanchester90 Hi, I am too having the same issue. This started after updating Windows update of 20H2 and as you have said before, its only for Outlook.

Please do share if you got any solutions and that would be of great help.

Thanks,

asboyd

Office 2016 has started doing this as well when you are logged into your MS account as your account does not have the product license, so it sees it as non-genuine.
I logged out of my MS account and it went away, so maybe there is something else that has to be done for KMS activations....
I have sent an email asking about this.

Cheers,

UPDATE it reappeared even when logged out.... bummer!

Vanchester90

asboyd thank you for the update! if you see anything elsewhere in regards to this please let us know here

Vanchester90

dhirhams

go check out the best answer I selected, worked for me

zabith007

hi there!
Update the MS Office to latest version.
Afterword, Remove the Entered Activation Keys and Reactivate. Enjoy!

Activation keys removing guide;

Open CMD as Admin
Enter below code as per your Office Version.

if your Office 2016 / 2019 is:
"cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16"
or
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16"

if your Office 2013 is :
"cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15"
or
"cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15"

Now you can check the license status by running the script called ospp.vbs, which is located in your Office program folder.

"cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus"

You’ll see some license details such as the license type (a retail copy, a volume licensed copy, or Office subscriptions copy) and the last 5 characters of the product key.

Remove Existing Office Product Key
To remove your Office product key, you need to use the /unpkeyswitch, along with the last 5 characters of the product key.

"cscript ospp.vbs /unpkey:{last five characters of product key}"

dhirhams

zabith007 tried this option, its not working, I am using Windows 10, latest version and Microsoft office Professional 2019. In CMD the message shows "successful" but later upon opening Word, Outlook, Excel etc, it asks for activating the Microsoft account and if you dont then the Ms office features are deactivated. To activate all these features the same old trick need to apply for CMD file.

Quetzalcoatl

zabith007 Thanks, this worked!

byambadorj

Having the same issue on Word and Excel... Any update to fix this problem? It was working fine for over a month and now it's damn annoying. Please admins provide us an update.

Vanchester90

byambadorj
go check out the best answer I selected, worked for me

zabith007

dhirhams
Didn’t it work?

Step 01 - update office to latest version.
Step 02 - Remove office keys
Step 03 - reactivate

That’s all.

If that keep on triggering as DrVlaming said;
Goto Options > General > Privacy Settings > toggle “Enable Optional connected experiences

asboyd

All apps in Office 2016 now show this. You can close the warning but it comes back when you open a stored file.

Vanchester90

asboyd
go check out the best answer I selected, worked for me

DrVlaming

uncheck in FILE // OPTIONS // PRIVACY SETTINGS

see attached pictures (in Dutch)

that solves the problem

GuangP

Sorry recently I do not have time to answer questions on the forum. Thank you so much @Vanchester90 and DrVlaming for your kind support.
Sticked this discussion. Definitely!

Vanchester90

zabith007

The privacy option has solved my issue. Thank you for the suggestion!

Any negatives on disabling this setting?

zabith007

Vanchester90 Most welcome

Would like to appreciate @DrVlaming for bringing out this idea

byambadorj

GuangP But disabling 'Enable Optional Connect Experience' disables Help/F1 function. Any fix to that?

gwong

Solution works for Office. It seems Visio, a part of Office separately packaged, doesn't have the issue and doesn't have the Privacy Settings either.

dher4455

gwong yeah, the solution is not working for Visio and Project, 2019. Dunno about 2016

GuangP

byambadorj You might not need to disable it. Follow instructions here and enable what you need only.

Vanchester90

GuangP

Thank you for this, I noticed that my OneNote notebooks in OneNote 2016 wouldn't show up if I wanted to open them after them being closed. I had a feeling by unchecking the "Enable connected experiences", which can be found under Account > Manage Settings (under Account Privacy) > All connected experiences, you also loose access to OneNote Notebooks saved in OneDrive.

I then rechecked "Enable connected experiences", opened OneNote 2016 and found the notebooks I couldn't find earlier but of course the yellow notification showed up again.

I then played around with the options under "Manage Settings", unchecked both:
1) "Experiences that analyze your content"
2) "Experiences that download online content"
to no avail. Unchecking both does not remove the yellow notification.

For now, the only solution to remove the yellow notification is the assigned "best solution" but it will remove OneNote 2016's access to your notebooks (which I use regularly).

If there are any other solutions that don't require to uncheck "Enable connected experiences", please let us know in this forum.

Thank you GuangP for your help!

MSDOS

Vanchester90
Exactly the same with OneNote2019. The check-box is related with sync features, logical
I'm enabling the Privacy Setting when I'm about to use OneNote. Disabling when not.

Please send if anyone has a permanent solution/workaround

Thanks all