Fake memory still being sold on eBay and Amazon

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About 12 years ago I found a flash drive on eBay that had a "too good to be true" price. I was suspicious of it, but I thought I would give it a try. It arrived and In my Windows pc it said it was the correct size. Being no fool, I ran H2TestW on it and sure enough it was fake. The memory size was actually 50 times smaller, faked to look like the correct size in Windows. The first few hundred megabytes actually worked, but any files written beyond this point would not be written as the capacity was not actually there.

I watched this eBay seller, and many more like him on eBay and Amazon. They usually start out with an account that looks in good standing, where you would see many happy customers. After a few months you start to see negative feedback where a small percentage of the several thousands of customers tested the drive as I did. Eventually the seller would be suspended, but not before he hadn't scammed thousands of people.

So many people receive these flash drives and look at the Windows drive capacity and think they got a good deal. They don't realize they've been scammed until they fill up the drive, sometimes months later. I think of how many students lost their work, how many photographers didn't capture the wedding, or people lost the video of the birth of their child. The amount of lost data, lost money, lost dreams.

I would like to tell you that eBay and Amazon, in the last 12 years since I saw this pattern of mass theft and mass attack on the American people, well I would like to tell you that it has been rooted out and you can now purchase flash memory on eBay and Amazon and feel confident that you will never lose your important data. I would like to tell you, but I am not a liar.