USB Flash Drivers on eBay
I bring to your attention the personal experience of buying USB flash drives on eBay. I hope this article will help someone not to get caught in the hands of fraudsters.
Most likely similar flash drives are sold in other places, be careful when buying!
')
How about this for just $ 17 including shipping?
Under the cut a lot of text, links and other useful information.
A month ago, I decided that my favorite Kingston DataTraveller on 4GB was too small and it was time to get something for something more capacious. At that time, I already had a successful eBay shopping experience. A quick search showed that now in terms of price / volume ratio, 16GB capacity works best for me. Within a few days, I successfully won three auctions, one from a seller named pangoal and two others from zhangfengping8888 . Quickly paid them via PayPal and waited for delivery. I was alarmed by the fact that I could not see the names of the other participants when viewing the bets, but at the time I did not attach any importance to this.
The first thunder struck a week later. Usually the seller on eBay sends the buyer an e-mail when sending the goods by mail. I never had such an e-mail from the seller from whom I bought one flash drive. I could not contact the seller because he was blocked. At the same time, he began to appear the first negative reviews. I had to complain to PayPal to get the money back.
It took a little more time and I finally got the long-awaited package from the second seller with two flash drives. One, without unpacking, presented to a friend for his birthday, the second left for himself and uploaded to her the pictures that he had been doing for the past few years. And then it began ...
I called a friend and said that his flash drive had stopped working. Arriving on a visit, made sure that something strange was really happening. A flash drive is detected by the system, but when you try to copy information, the device simply disappeared from the system. Reformatting the flash drive and making sure that now everything is working as it should, I went home.
The next day, a friend called me again and complained that something was wrong again. By trial and error, it turned out that the flash drive works fine with small portions of data. As soon as the data volume exceeded a certain line, the flash drive failed. I took it away and, promising my friend to sort it out in more detail, went home ... where I was surprised a lot, because this time I couldn’t copy photos from my own flash drive! Having decided that the probability of a breakdown of two flash drives in one day is rather small, I turned to Google.
It was here that the bitter truth was revealed. I became a victim of scammers who sell fake flash drives. Chinese craftsmen change the information in the controller of the flash drive so that it reports false information about its volume. Most often they convert 1-2GB to 16-32-64GB. Many users do not immediately use the full amount of flash drives, the poem can take quite a long time between buying and detecting a fake.
What to do if you purchased one of these flash drives on eBay?
To get started, check the flash drive with the H2testw program (the latest version for today 1.4 is here ). Here is the result of one of my fake flash drives:
As you can see, this is a 2GB flash drive that has been reprogrammed to 16GB. If you have a similar result, immediately go to your PayPal account and open a complaint (in English, go to the Resolution Center and open a new Case). Remember:
When there is absolutely nothing to lose, you can try to fix the flash drive, return it to its original state. It is described in English, I have not tried it myself yet.
How not to fall for the con artist?
Useful links, unfortunately everything is in English
http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com - a site dedicated to the fight against fake flash drives. On the left in the “Quick links” group, the “eBay Fakes - Seller List” link leads to the current list of sellers seen in the sale of fakes.
http://www.toolhaus.org - various tools for easy filtering of seller reviews
h2testw_1.4.zip - program for testing flash drives
update : http://www.ebay-forum.ru - forum in Russian, dedicated to eBay.
Ps. The first post on Habré, I will be glad to read your reviews.
Most likely similar flash drives are sold in other places, be careful when buying!
')
How about this for just $ 17 including shipping?
Under the cut a lot of text, links and other useful information.
A month ago, I decided that my favorite Kingston DataTraveller on 4GB was too small and it was time to get something for something more capacious. At that time, I already had a successful eBay shopping experience. A quick search showed that now in terms of price / volume ratio, 16GB capacity works best for me. Within a few days, I successfully won three auctions, one from a seller named pangoal and two others from zhangfengping8888 . Quickly paid them via PayPal and waited for delivery. I was alarmed by the fact that I could not see the names of the other participants when viewing the bets, but at the time I did not attach any importance to this.
The first thunder struck a week later. Usually the seller on eBay sends the buyer an e-mail when sending the goods by mail. I never had such an e-mail from the seller from whom I bought one flash drive. I could not contact the seller because he was blocked. At the same time, he began to appear the first negative reviews. I had to complain to PayPal to get the money back.
It took a little more time and I finally got the long-awaited package from the second seller with two flash drives. One, without unpacking, presented to a friend for his birthday, the second left for himself and uploaded to her the pictures that he had been doing for the past few years. And then it began ...
I called a friend and said that his flash drive had stopped working. Arriving on a visit, made sure that something strange was really happening. A flash drive is detected by the system, but when you try to copy information, the device simply disappeared from the system. Reformatting the flash drive and making sure that now everything is working as it should, I went home.
The next day, a friend called me again and complained that something was wrong again. By trial and error, it turned out that the flash drive works fine with small portions of data. As soon as the data volume exceeded a certain line, the flash drive failed. I took it away and, promising my friend to sort it out in more detail, went home ... where I was surprised a lot, because this time I couldn’t copy photos from my own flash drive! Having decided that the probability of a breakdown of two flash drives in one day is rather small, I turned to Google.
It was here that the bitter truth was revealed. I became a victim of scammers who sell fake flash drives. Chinese craftsmen change the information in the controller of the flash drive so that it reports false information about its volume. Most often they convert 1-2GB to 16-32-64GB. Many users do not immediately use the full amount of flash drives, the poem can take quite a long time between buying and detecting a fake.
What to do if you purchased one of these flash drives on eBay?
To get started, check the flash drive with the H2testw program (the latest version for today 1.4 is here ). Here is the result of one of my fake flash drives:
Warning: Only 15983 of 15984 MByte tested.
The media is likely to be defective.
1.8 GByte OK (3936669 sectors)
13.7 GByte DATA LOST (28796515 sectors)
Details:10.2 GByte overwritten (21591648 sectors)
752 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 1504 sectors)
3.4 GByte corrupted (7203363 sectors)
1.5 KByte aliased memory (3 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x0000000000000218
Expected: 0x0005480f001a6e01
Found: 0x0005480e001a6e01
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 12.7 MByte/s
Reading speed: 11.5 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4As you can see, this is a 2GB flash drive that has been reprogrammed to 16GB. If you have a similar result, immediately go to your PayPal account and open a complaint (in English, go to the Resolution Center and open a new Case). Remember:
- You have only 45 days from the date of payment, during which you can file a complaint.
- Do not begin negotiations with the seller - in vain you will lose precious time
- Never send a flash drive back, otherwise you yourself will lose the only proof and in addition will incur additional shipping costs. It is also useful to know that in many countries the transfer of counterfeit goods is considered a crime, so you can safely rely on this to justify refusal to return.
- Even if PayPal itself requires you to send a flash drive, do not do it - this is a mistake in their automatic complaint handling system. Contact them by e-mail or in extreme cases, call back and explain the situation, they should cancel the request to send the flash drive to the seller
- In the text of the complaint indicate:
- eBay item number
- EBay seller name
- Your ebay name
- Results of H2testw
- Description of the lot if it has already been deleted on eBay
- The full address of the seller (if you have one)
- Description of problems when working with a flash drive and your impressions of its quality (optional)
When there is absolutely nothing to lose, you can try to fix the flash drive, return it to its original state. It is described in English, I have not tried it myself yet.
How not to fall for the con artist?
- Pay attention to the quantity and quality of reviews. If there are less than a couple of thousand - do not buy
- Check out the latest negative reviews. Since eBay itself does not allow filtering reviews, you can use the site http://www.toolhaus.org
- Pay attention to the date of registration of the seller. Do not buy from newly registered
- Do not buy from sellers from Hong Kong and China, too high a risk to get a fake
- Check that the seller is not in the list of those who were seen selling fakes (link is dynamic, at the end of the article)
- Check that your flash drive and the seller are not in the official report of fake eBay flash drives for 2008 . Sellers of fakes often use the same pictures, and specially blurred or edited.
- See if you can see the names of the other participants when viewing the bets. If you see something like “Bidder 1” instead of real names, “Bidder 2” - this means that the seller has enabled the option to hide the real names of customers. Typically, this option is used when selling expensive items or drugs, where it is undesirable for other users to see the names of competitors. Vendors of fakes use this opportunity so that other users could not warn about fake bidding.
- Remember, the maximum capacity of a flash drive today is 64GB, all that is more is 100% fake
Useful links, unfortunately everything is in English
http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com - a site dedicated to the fight against fake flash drives. On the left in the “Quick links” group, the “eBay Fakes - Seller List” link leads to the current list of sellers seen in the sale of fakes.
http://www.toolhaus.org - various tools for easy filtering of seller reviews
h2testw_1.4.zip - program for testing flash drives
update : http://www.ebay-forum.ru - forum in Russian, dedicated to eBay.
Ps. The first post on Habré, I will be glad to read your reviews.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/55990/
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