According to some sources almost 90% of all large capacity USB flash drives sold on eBay are fakes. That is a scary statistics. What is a fake USB flash drive? It is a flash drive that reports the capacity that is larger than the physical size of the drive. For example, the 2GB drive can report itself as an 8GB drive, 256MB drive can report as 2GB, and etc.

Here is my story. I was on the market to buy a large capacity USB drive (preferably not less than 8GB). I installed a new car deck with the USB input and wanted to use that USB flash drive as a source of music and audio books that I listen when driving to and from work. So, I browsed eBay and found a listing for an 8GB flash drive which, as reported by the seller, was made by Samsung (Samsung makes the best flash memory). Since the seller had high reputation and his sales count was over 9,000 and because the listing said that the item was located in the United Kingdom, I decided to buy the unit.

So, I pad 53 Euros, which amounted to about 83CAD and a couple of weeks later received the drive in a letter mail from… Hong Kong. Sh*&%%t I told myself, didn’t the seller list the UK as the item location? I came home, plugged in the drive into my laptop, checked the properties of the drive and smiled when I saw that the drive was working and reported itself to be 8GB in size.

Luckily, I did not rush and post the positive feedback right away. Later that day I started copying music to the drive and was very surprised when I saw that ALL the music files got corrupted once I copied more than 2GB to the drive. I formatted the drive and tried copying the files again only to see the same result.

At that time I did not know anything about fake drives. So, I started researching the Internet and found lots of info about it. The best post was made by one of the eBay sellers and you can read it here: http://reviews.ebay.com/BEWARE-of-FAKE-1GB-2GB-4GB-8GB-USB-Flash-Drives-on-eBay_W0QQugidZ10000000001236200

In short, the seller from whom I bought the flash drive committed a fraud selling me a fake USB flash drive. So, here is what I did:

I wrote a short email to the seller saying that if I will not get a refund within 5 days I will report him to eBay and PayPal, and I will initiate a charge back on my Visa (I financed the purchase with the Vista card). The guy responded immediately trying to weasel his way out of the situation. But I was very persistent and he issued a full refund. The funny thing is that he did not even ask me to return the drive. He must be making some good money defrauding people on eBay.

So, if you bought a fake USB flash drive, know that the person who sold you the drive committed fraud and that you are entitled to a refund. The next question is what to do with the fake drive if it is left in your possession? Is it possible to use it? The answer is yes, it is quite possible to make the drive work properly and I will explain how to do it in my next post.

1. Sorry to hear you are having trouble buying USB Flash Drives.

   I have now bought 2 X 8GB USB Flash Drives - on eBay and had no problem.

   Both the drives came from China, delivered promptly.

   I guess you pays your money . . . and takes your pick.

   Posted by David | January 10, 2008, 5:33 am

2. It’s OK, really. Actually, I now have a free 2GB USB drive. How? Very simple - I told the seller that if he wanted the drive shipped to him, he had to send me money to cover the postal fees. Guess what, he never sent me the money, so now I own a free 2GB USB flash drive.

   Nikolai

   Posted by Nikolai | February 20, 2008, 10:43 pm