USB Flash Drive Scam

I recently attempted to purchase a 16GB USB flash drive on Ebay.  I should have known better, and there is already plenty of info written on the internet about this type of scam, but it goes to show that even technically savvy people can be taken advantage of.  I received the flash drive from the vendor out of Hong Kong, and it was an unbranded model.  When I inserted the device into the USB port on a computer and queried the drive, it reported the size as 16 GB.  My intention was to use the device to backup my personal files, which were about 12 GB worth of data.  So I did a file copy of all my backup files to the drive.  It took a long time, but eventually it said the disk was full.  I queried the disk and it reported that there was still plenty of available space on it.  I started to browse through the files, and many were missing.  I deleted all the files, and the drive still reported that it had about the same amount of space left as before, except now it was empty.  Reformatting it returned it to its normal state of reporting the full 16 GB free.  I started to get suspicious but I tried a few more ways of backing up my files to the drive and nothing worked.

Finally I was very suspicious, so I opened up the drive's case and looked.  The flash chip on the device had the Spectek (it had been advertised to be Samsung memory) logo on it and the part number of FBNL52A8GK3WG was on the chip.  I looked up this chip on Spectek's web site and it is an 8 Gb chip.  The drive only has 1 GB of storage on it!  The scam is that unscrupulous Ebay sellers are putting some sort of hacked memory controller onto USB drives that have much smaller amounts of memory than advertised.  The hacked controller will report the advertised size to the operating system, but will not be able to store the full amount of data.  The controller will discard some of the data written to it and appear to work as normal, except that when you try to read your data back off the drive, some of it will be missing.  More information about this scam can be found directly on Ebay in this Ebay Guides article by memory-r-us:

BEWARE of FAKE 1GB/2GB/4GB/8GB USB Flash Drives on eBay  

In addition to not having the correct amount of memory, the hacked controller significantly bogged down the computer it was plugged into, and also took much longer than would be expected to perform write operations.  Digging a little further revealed that this particular seller had been called out for this same fraud on the same exact item in their feedback history, but their overall feedback was almost 99% positive, so I didn't go back and look at every negative comment before purchasing.  To the seller's credit, I was given an immediate refund, but I suspect they will continue selling this faked product to others hoping that the fraud won't be discovered immediately by a novice user and they can make off with the money.

The device I bought was unbranded, but this same scam has apparently been used on actual branded products as well.  These criminals will open up the flash drive, replace the memory with a smaller density chip and replace the controller with their hacked chip, and then reseal everything up and sell them.  They even have valid serial numbers still on them from the original manufacturer.  It's hard to believe the amount of engineering effort that is put into this scam being worth the payoff.

I've learned my lesson about buying cheap consumer electronics on Ebay.  "Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me!" - My Grandma.