FBI Special agent Richard Garcia displays Microsoft computer software during a news conference Friday, Aug.10, 2001, at the FBI Los Angeles Field office. Four suspects were arrested Thursday in San Gabriel Valley, Calif. with counterfeit Microsoft products with an estimate value of $10.5 million. Some of the counterfeit software is displayed along with genuine versions on the table. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Four suspected software pirates arrested in Los Angeles this week with counterfeit Microsoft products were running a big, sophisticated operation but failed to fake the anti-piracy hologram on the disks, a company security executive said on Saturday. On Thursday, the FBI seized $10.5 million in counterfeit Microsoft software and arrested four men who allegedly smuggled several different versions of fake software products from Asia and sold them at deep discounts. A fifth man is still at large. ``They were a very sophisticated group,'' Richard LaMagna, senior manager of worldwide piracy enforcement at Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp told Reuters.

LaMagna said the group was well-organized, well-funded and appeared to be ``distributing millions of dollars of software.''He said that the software CDs seized included Microsoft's Windows Millennium Edition The genuine version carries an edge-to-edge hologram as a security feature, which LaMagna said the pirates tried to imitate. ``We're pleased that they haven't been able to do that very well,'' he said. The pirates had placed stickers which looked like the hologram on their CDs, but these were easy to peel off.