I learned something interesting last week, fortunately before I made my purchase.

I wanted an 8 GB flash drive to plug into my Honda's stereo system, so I went to eBay to find one that was inexpensive. In doing so, I came across a seller that was offering "Flash Drive Recovery" starting at $5.00. Wondering what was up with that, I did some followup research, and found out that the sale of bogus flash drives on eBay (and many other on-line sources) is positively endemic, to the point where the majority of flash drives sold are fraudulent.

What is happening is that an unscrupulous seller purchases 1 GB or 2 GB flash drives, relabels them as 8 GB or 16 GB or even 32 or 64 GB drives, and hacks the file allocation table so that if you do a "properties" listing on the drive it will show the labeled amount as available space. The flash drive will work just fine until you exceed the actual physical capacity of the drive, at which point it will then start over from the beginning, overwriting your earlier data without presenting any error messages. This goes on until it compromises the integrity of the file system, turning the flash drive into a Lego-sized brick.

A great deal more information about this can be found here.

What I learned is don't trust anybody selling flash drives at suspiciously low prices. For an 8 GB flash drive, anything under $16 is almost certainly bogus.

There is a highly recommended flash drive test program available here. Warning: This link will automatically download the program (213 KB zip file) the moment you click on it.

I ended up buying my 8 GB flash drive from this guy for $17.95 after seeing several references that he was trustworthy. (This link is for an auction that will expire in a week or so, so it will only work until eBay deletes the auction in what, 60 or 90 days?) Scroll down and watch his video...

Anyway, I thought I'd pass on what I learned. Maybe it's old news and you knew all about it already, but it was new to me.

tanstaafl.

The very first thing that *everyone* should do with *any* new drive, flash, spinning, or whatever, is *repartition* and then *reformat it* (including the boot sector). To avoid any unwanted "gifts", like spyware or botware.

Doing so will also immediately make the real capacity apparent, too. No need for special software, just ordinary precautions will do.

I do it here, too. Even though that kind of malware has zero effect on my systems (Linux).

Cheers

I wish we could bring back flogging as a punishment for this kind of thing.

Also, I remember paying $1,200.00 for a 1gb hard drive...

I absolutely agree that what you describe is a horrible thing to do.

But I have to say, ebay is the last place on earth I'd go to buy something as basic as a 1 or 2GB flash drive. What, is $7 for a 2GB name-brand drive too much?

And how much do those unscrupulous sellers on ebay charge for shipping on that drive? Probably more than you can get from a legitimate retailer, bringing the price up to more than the ebay price. Even if it's slightly lower, the peace of mind I get from buying at a legit source is more than worth it.

I think you're seeing one of the many reasons that I never buy anything at ebay anymore. Fraud is simply rampant (and they do nothing about any of it), their fees for sellers are crazy, Paypal is annoying (and they don't help with fraud either), and in the end you don't really find a deal on there anymore (especially in electronics).

*edit*
You might also try brick and mortar stores for something like a flash drive. I was at my local computer store the other day, and they have bins of flash drives at every checkout counter. 2GB for $6.99, just like on Newegg.

8GB drives for less than CAD$20 (US$18-19) are commonplace in stores here. Cheaper ones can be found with some hunting. I think even dealextreme.com may have them in that price range, shipping included.

Eg. sku numbers 18567, 19112, 12085, and 11243.

Cheers

And here's a Kingston 8GB drive on Newegg for $16.49 and free shipping.

I'm not sure that's the case -- AFAICT, if it were only the FAT and partition table that were faked, then even Windows (certainly Disk Manager) would notice something fishy about it. I get the impression that these fake drives have had their onboard firmware reflashed to return the wrong, fake answer for the underlying SCSI read capacity call -- which would be enough to deceive the kernel and/or fdisk. The "fakeness testing" programs out there, work by attempting to write different data to each sector, and failing the drive if any data mysteriously turns up on the wrong sector due to the whole thing being modulo 256M or some other size smaller than the advertised capacity.

Peter

I've bought all of my flash drives from Costco recently. Including two 'emergency' SDHC cards when the old iBook died in Las Vegas last year. They weren't 'super' cheap, but they were the same price as my usual sources (Scan, Aria, Microdirect), which is enough for me.

From the original posting:

So they're ordinary drives, with a corrupted FAT filesystem. Easy to detect/repair before initial use.

More sophisticated corrupted *firmware* might also exist out there, but I find that rather unlikely and uneconomical for the fraudster.

Cheers

No, really, it's the firmware.

Tanstaafl (or his source) is using "file allocation table" in the layman's sense of "metadata about the filesystem". The problem with these drives is not in the FAT (obviously), nor the FAT filesystem superblock (which is what whoever wrote "file allocation table" probably meant), nor the partition table.

Peter

I saw some of these in Shenzhen recently... though they were easier to spot, as getting a 128GB thumb drive for $20 does really seem to be way too good to be true

Hugo

Wow! I should really know better by now than to doubt Peter!

It's really amazing the stuff people think up these days.

Presumably what's going on, is that the flash controller chip is an off-the-shelf part which has to work with all manner of flash-chip suppliers and capacities (and even an individual manufacturer of flash drives will often want to change supplier or capacity as prices shift; flash pricing is notoriously volatile). So, rather than embed a huge, ever-changing list of flash-chip IDs in the controller chip firmware itself and have it auto-detect, they just store the information in a "secret" flash block which the flash-drive manufacturer programs on the finished device in the factory. Once the unscrupulous figured this out -- which probably required nothing more nefarious than reading the controller-chip's datasheet -- the game was unfortunately on.

Peter

Not at all... but $25+ is more than I wanted to spend for 8GB.



In almost every case, shipping is Free to encourage the gullible. They drop it into a padded envelope and put 42 cents (44 cents now, I guess...) postage on it and drop it in the mail.

tanstaafl.

$15?

Unfortuantely I was caught up in one of these back before it was a widely known scam, fortunately I figured it was probably too good to be true so didn't end up paying much.

I got one but figured out very quickly that it was "not right." Files over one Gig would show as files (mostly) but the data would not be there. Formatting the drive did not help. Since I acted so fast (I guess while they still had money in the bank) I got a refund.

How'd you manage to get a refund? Via the seller or via paypal? The seller told me if I sent them back he would give me a replacement, but obviously that would be bogus too. I contacted Paypal but they were most unhelpful

+$4.23 tax and shipping = $19.22, 7% more than I paid. (Ebay auction had free shipping). Not that $1.27 makes any significant difference. Had I thought to look at Newegg, I would have done that instead of eBay, but I went to eBay first, found a reasonable Buy It Now deal and took it. In the process I learned about the fake flash drive business, so that was just an added bonus.

tanstaafl.

In my second post I linked to a 16GB Kingston drive on Newegg for $16.49 with free shipping.


In the end, to me this thread is not about prices or the fake flash drive business. This is about ebay being an awful online store.

And that's what they're becoming now, a storefront. You even said so yourself, you just went there and looked for a good Buy It Now price. The problem, IMO, is that the site was never really designed to work this way, and they were never prepared to handle this type of business. The result is rampant fraud and little to no recourse for victims of it.

In contrast, Amazon sells products from thousands of partners, and I've never had a bad experience purchasing from one of these other sellers through them.

I filed a claim with Paypal and through the claim notified the seller that I had a defective SD card. I described the problems I was having and politely insinuated that this might be a bogus card.

My guess is that the seller refunded my money because at that time they had 100% feedback. To keep me happy they gave me my $15 back. They didn’t even want the card back (imagine that).