Fake 16GB Kingston Data Traveller
What appear to be 2GB Kingston flash drives seem to have been re-programmed by fraudsters and sold on Ebay as 16GB drives by a number of sellers. Before you bid on flash drives where pictures show a brand name (especially if the brand is not mentioned in the listing title!) you should check the manufacturer’s web site to establish that the model shown is genuinely of the claimed capacity.
A case in point is the drive shown below. Note that the coloured part of the plasic casing in the photo is green – therefore it cannot possibly be a genuine 16GB Kingston Datatraveler drive. The label on the other side of the drive from the green plastic Kingston name is also wrong – it doesn’t match genuine Kingston labels!
The label colour almost matches the colour of the plastic in Kingston’s picture of this model of data traveler drives. Our seller’s picture shows green plastic and a mustard coloured label – hmm – feeling suspicious yet?
Here is the colour coding info for this type of drive from the Kingston site:
2GB USB flash drive (2.0) – Lime
4GB USB flash drive (2.0) – Purple
8GB USB flash drive (2.0) – Black
16GB USB flash drive (2.0) – Dark Red
Got the picture yet? It seems our friend is selling a fraudulently reprogrammed and re-labeled 2GB drives as 16GB PLEASE NOTE: THERE ARE NO DRIVES ABOVE 16GB IN THIS RANGE!
If you see 32GB Kingston flash drives that look like these they are certainly fake. You should report the seller to ebay (for all the good it does) and if the seller is in the UK report them to the police, trading standards and anyone else you can think of too!
If you bought a drive like this on ebay test it with h2testw immediately and claim a refund.
Report your fake if testing confirms you have purchased fake capacity flash memory on ebay.
Fighting flash fraud on Ebay 
I expect it showed 15.7 or something like that – do bear in mind that no flash drive has the whole space available for file storage. There is what we call an “overhead” – space reserved for file management etc.
Frank
June 3, 2009 at 8:05 AM
I bought kingston data traveler 16gb pendrive. It does not show accurate capacity, it shows 15gb. I suggest do not go for kingston. Transcend is better.
Rohit
June 3, 2009 at 6:31 AM
Ebay and pay-pal use autoresponders – computer programs that automatically generate messages. Do not return the drive – see the refund advice sosfakeflash for the reasons. Once a real person looks at your claim you should get a more sensible response.
fightflashfraud
May 4, 2009 at 11:42 AM
I purchased a QC2 16GB USB 2.0 Drive Flash Memory Thumb Stick 8 16 G GB w
it tested 1.9 GB with h2testw I got it of ebay, seller calltimtim. Now PayPal says to get a refund I have to pay for the return and include a tracking number, Being an honest buyer I feel it is not right that we are penalised like a criminal, while the dishonest get away, fedup have been cought with things from China before. What is Ebay & payPal up to??
Peter Lumsden
May 4, 2009 at 11:20 AM
Don’t forget to report in using the “report a fake” tab at sosfakeflash if your drive fails the test with h2testw!
fightflashfraud
March 12, 2009 at 1:10 AM
Thanks a million. I had my suspicions but this really clinched it.
Ben
March 11, 2009 at 5:03 PM
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