Ever see the thousands and thousands of reworked corporate desktop computers? Recycled on ebay. There are businesses with tens of thousands of ebay sales.
You might typically see a Dell Optiplex that has Intel 4th generation i3, i5, i7. Beefed up ram to 8 or 16 gigabytes. A replaced hard drive. Even SSDs if you look. And Windows 10. The Dells originally came with Windows 7. Those 4th gen i5 CPUs are very strong and great for Win 10.
Selling for $150-$200-$225 or so. My thought is that Microsoft is selling them Windows 10 licenses very cheap, like $10 each. Or allowing enabling Win 7 to Win 10 upgrades at this late date.
I am not sure of the explanation for these cheap Microsoft licenses from Europe. But I suspect that yours is likely pretty close. I am not sure how it is that Microsoft would allow some of these sellers to sell them year after year and accumulate thousands of positive feedback if it were complete piracy or fraud. I am sure that there have been fly by night operators on eBay who have taken advantage of people, but eBay’s feedback system tends to identify them out fairly effectively at least for experienced customers.
According to the EPA 416,000 mobile devices and 142,000 computers are discarded every day in the United States alone. Because there are even more people living in Europe than we have here, I would assume that their figures are even higher. So that comes to over 100 million computers a year. If even a small percentage have licenses that can be transferred during the recycling process that would be more than enough to supply the relatively small amount compared to this figure that are sold on eBay. It is likely that European nations limit Microsoft’s ability to write their licenses in ways that prevent this from being done which would help to explain why nearly all the vendors doing this are from Europe.
I have purchased quite a few laptops and desktops and spare parts for myself and others over the years. I replaced the motherboard on one of my previous laptops several times. It had a socketed CPU and GPU which allowed me to upgrade them when the price became reasonable, but this caused an increase in internal temperatures which put a strain on some of the other surface mounted components when doing processor intensive tasks such as video editing. Fortunately, the same motherboard was used in several of the manufacturer’s other laptop models so there was an abundant supply of recycled pieces. I was very happy that eBay gave me a source of reasonably priced recycled components.
There are a large percentage of us who sometimes assume we have been ripped off when actually we have just made some small mistake which actually caused our difficulties. If the organization that I purchased my Windows 7 pro license I thought had gone bad hadn’t gotten back to me and provided good technical support I would have just assumed that I had been scammed. The deal seemed to good to be true so I still do not have a high level of confidence in any of the cheap licenses that I have purchased. But it turned out that I had just screwed it up by not deleting the checkpoint in my virtual machine that was made before I had completed the licensing verification process with Microsoft.
But I also sometimes wonder what percentage of the horror stories spread about people getting ripped off on recycled computers, components and software licenses are started by people working for product and software manufacturers.