FAKE USB Flash Drives are around the traps again..

[chrisn5162]

Waiting to trap us guys and gals into buying them...Noticed a lot going over the last month or so, at least more than usual!

Mainly no brand devices in the range of 32 to 128GB, all very cheap of course.

I suspect that some otherwise reliable sellers are getting conned into selling  these things without any real checks.

I bought a 32GB drive for $2.70 that didn't live up to it's name (well actually it didn't really have a name, just a 32GB sticker!)

They can start off being written to OK, then run out of real room, throw data away, or start writing data back over what is already written , very convenient.

Tests using FAKEFLASHTEST v1.1.1  showed "Device has duplicate or bad blocks"

The testing program and instructions are available here..

http://www.rmprepusb.com/tutorials/-fake-usb-flash-memory-drives

I found it ran very slowly on the faulty drive but very fast on a good drive.

[horizon1907]

chrisn, Please very very careful with this sort of Device. They can be extremely dangerous and start fires etc.  IMO go into a B & M Store and buy one.  For the sake of a few extra $$, it's not worth buying them on line. Especially if they are Cheap. They may look the same, but are inferior in Quality and Components.  There have been many posts about these and similar devices on the Boards. 

[cq_tech]

The very best program for determining whether or not your SD card or USB drive has been hacked, and what its original size was, is the brilliant German utility called h2testw.exe, the results from which are accepted by Paypal as evidence that the device has been hacked and is counterfeit. A google search will find it for you very quickly.

I bought a couple of purported 64Gb drives from AliExpress recently and at only US$8 I had a pretty fair idea they'd be fakes, and sure enough, they were. I simply sent screen dumps of the results of h2testw.exe to the seller and he didn't even try to argue the point. He immediately refunded my money under AliExpress's Buyer Protection Program.

When he told me that he wanted the drives back, I told him that he wasn't getting them because under AU law it was illegal to send counterfeit items through the mail. That was the last I heard from him (and I even made almost a dollar on the reverse exchange rate as the AU dollar had fallen since I initially bought them. 🙂

[chrisn5162]

I tested the 32GB sick stick with h2testw.exe as follows...

Warning: Only 30983 of 30984 MByte tested.
The media is likely to be defective.
13.8 GByte OK (28997632 sectors)
16.4 GByte DATA LOST (34455552 sectors)
Details:0 KByte overwritten (0 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
16.4 GByte corrupted (34455552 sectors)
0 KByte aliased memory (0 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x0000000364f16000
Expected: 0x0000000364f16000
Found: 0x0000000000000000
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 2.16 MByte/s
Reading speed: 8.05 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4

Oh well, it convinced the seller to give me a refund although they probably don't understand much about it themselves.

They all seem to sell like hotcakes so I geuss most people are not aware of the problem or don't really care.

They just accept the short end of the stick, so to speak.

[cq_tech]

I think the main problem is being in a position to obtain incontrovertible evidence that the card or drive has been hacked to read a greater capacity that it really is, and this is where h2testw.exe is worth its weight in gold. Far too many people write it off as bad luck and don't bother trying to recover their money, and the sellers are aware of this, which is why they continue to sell their dodgy cards until sufficient buyers complain so that eBay eventually shuts them down.

It might only be a few dollars, but if everybody who was stung by these crooks lodged complaints with Paypal and included the report from h2testw.exe, not only would they get their money back (instead of the seller) but they'd be shut down far more quickly than they are at the moment so fewer buyers would end up being ripped off in the future.

The other problem is that most buyers don't use more than the first few Gb of their card's capacity for some time, so it's often weeks or even months before they realise they've been ripped off. This is why I immediately test every high-capacity card I buy the moment it arrives, especially because it's not always only the cheapies which are counterfeit.

[markcjm]

They don't start fires, LOL. But they could contain malware, viruses or keyloggers.

[pixie-six]

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