Fake 120GB Sony drives sold on ebay by UK sellers!

This is possibly the boldest fraud ever committed on ebay! At least two UK sellers listed 120GB flash drives displaying Sony brand names in early December. Sony does not sell 120GB flash drives. These drives are not only fake capacity, but also an infringment of Sony’s trademark names!

How people get away with flash fraud on ebay

The flash memory sold by ebay fraudsters generally has a very much lower capacity than stated – sometimes as little as a sixteenth of that advertised. These drives have been programmed using the same tools as the manufactures use to program drives of genuine capacity. 1GB of flash memory can be programmed by fraudsters to appear to be 4GB, 8GB, 16GB or even higher capacities using these tools.

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.