WARNING: defective flash drives on ebay are not faulty but fake!!

In recent months we have seen a lot of flash drives listed on ebay as faulty – they are not faulty. They are deliberately manufactured by fraudsters in China to show a fake capacity to the operating system with the result that anyone using a fake capacity flash drive eventually discovers that the drive corrupts their files.

Here is an example listing for such a supposedly defective flash drive:

We wonder if this could possibly be the self same flash drive previously sold by schopf7loch on May 29th for EUR 31,50 (ebay item number 290438585061) as the buyer left a neutral comment and seems to have had a refund – so probably sent it back to the seller.

We also see quite a number of ebay listings that openly state that the flash drive is fake, sometimes with headings like “genuine fake” – sadly fraudulent sellers picked this idea up from people who were just trying to warn fellow ebayers.

Those with genuine warnings usually either disabled the drive and explained that it would not work at all or just sold pictures of fakes. Some fraudsters have cottoned on to how foolish people can be and are using this as a new strategy to sell their fakes.

Many ebayers who put up warning listings had a lot of foolish people who put in bids without reading listings properly. These ebayers went to a lot of trouble to try to inform the bidders of the facts about fake flash. Sometimes these ebayers got bids from cunning fraudsters (often using alternate IDs) who left negative comments immediately they won an auction (when the ebayer who was warning was not vigilant enough to be watching at the auction end) and immediately skipped off ebay!

Some ebayers who fell victim to fake flash memory items on ebay put warnings outside of ebay – follow the link for an example from 2009:

http://www.digitaldjequipment.com/05/counterfeit-fake-usb-flash-drives-on-ebay/

So why, oh why, are ebayers STILL buying fake flash memory items??