How to tell whether a USB flash drive on Ebay is counterfeit
The information that was on this page is now outdated – see the Guide to fake flash page instead. There is now a pdf guide on the new page available for you to print out or download to your computer.
[...] How to tell whether a USB flash drive on Ebay is counterfeit [...]
fightflashfraud confirms Kingston only make one 64GB flash drive « Fighting flash fraud on Ebay
February 1, 2009 at 12:07 am
[...] leave a comment » Seller ko_091582 registered as an ebay member on 1 July 2008 but there was no activity on the account until near the end of January 2008. This seller, based in China, began by selling jewellery items but has now (having got 5 positive feedback comments) switched to selling flash drives. There are no current listings for jewellery items. This seller’s listings are very careless – items 280311404858 and 280311132264 are both titled New Kingston 32GB stainless steel Memory Stick USB 2.0 but one shows what appears to be an 8GB Kingston DataTraveller in plastic and the other shows a metal drive bearing the name Sony. Kingston do not make a stainless steel 32GB flash drive – the only real 32GB Kingston drives can be seen here. [...]
Seller ko_091582 Sells fake 32GB Kingston USB flash drives « Fighting flash fraud on Ebay
February 8, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Is there any fake flash drive test for people with Macs?
James Greenidge
June 17, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Afraid we don’t know of a test program you can use on the mac – perhaps you could get a friend with a PC to do the test for you? Otherwise I’d suggest copying some large video files to the drive. DON’T USE THE MOVE COMMAND THOUGH! – chances are that most of the files will become corrupted if the drive is fake capacity.
fightflashfraud
June 17, 2009 at 3:02 pm
You can use the Mac OS X Disk Utility (DU) application. Plug in your USB stick and let DU verify it. If it complains you most likely have a fake one.
Visual Ideas
September 1, 2009 at 4:07 pm
To Visual Ideas,
I haven’t used a Mac for a few years so have never used a flash drive with one – will this disk utility actually read and write to the flash memory to check it or does it (like windoze) just report what the controller on the drive says? Must find someone with a Mac so I can see what the Mac says about my fakes!
fightflashfraud
September 1, 2009 at 4:33 pm
It will read and write to the flash memory to check/repair it. I ran the DU application on several fake capacity flash drives and uploaded a screenshot of one @ http://plumjava.com/images/fakecapacityflashdrive.jpg
Visual Ideas
September 1, 2009 at 11:48 pm
To test whether or not you’re Kingston products are actually 100% Authentic and have not been registered by somebody else please visit the Kingston website: http://www.kingston.com/asia/verifyflash/
Fill in the details and you can select any: Country/Region as this doesn’t matter. Also the Customer Information section is optional and is not needed to get an answer!
It worked for me mine is already registered by another user!!!
If you bought it from eBay and paid with PayPal then you can make a claim stating it is a fake but first you might want to contact the seller as maybe, just maybe they are unaware of this.
I’ll be doing that right now.
If you need any other information on this just reply using this comment section.
Bob
September 8, 2009 at 11:23 am