Beware fake flash drives
2011-04-19 07:02
Cape Town - As flash storage becomes more common place, consumers should beware of criminals selling high capacity flash drives which may not have the advertised storage.
"This guy came up to my window at a traffic light with a 32GB flash drive. I took a chance on it because it was in the packaging, but when I got home it didn't work properly," said News24 user Ashwin Lynch.
A News24 investigation revealed that the flash drive is identified by a computer running Microsoft Windows as a 32GB drive, but all attempts to write data to the device failed.
These flash drives are being sold through various vendors in major centres and they retail from between R150 to R250.
What fools consumers is that they are packaged like the brands from the factory.
Company logos
The drive Lynch bought was labelled as a Transcend, but News24 has determined that Kingston drives are also being sold on classified websites and flea markets in major centres around the country.
The scam seems to be perpetrated right at the factory gate though, as the drives are officially discarded because they are found to be faulty during the production process.
Unscrupulous vendors manage to secure the faulty flash drives earmarked for disposal and get them back into circulation, even having them packaged and labelled with the correct company logos.
The flash drives may fool even sophisticated users because computers running Windows identifies them with the stated capacity, often 32GB, but as the price for legitimate drives falls, there is no reason why criminals cannot increase the apparent capacity.
One method to identify fraudulent drives is to download USB Flash Drive Tester, Flash Memory Toolkit or HD_Speed. These programs test the drive by writing data to it and can generally identify speed and bad sectors, but cannot repair faulty drives.
Drives bought at flea markets and street vendors in a News24 test failed to hold their stated capacity. A flea market vendor who declined to be identified would not say where the drives originated from, nor give the name of his supplier.
Consumers who buy technology equipment should perhaps ensure that they do so from reputable dealers so that they may demand a money back guarantee if the devices do not perform up to scratch.
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