The Fake 1TB USB Flash Drive Scam
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- Опубліковано 8 кві 2021
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Fake flash drives are still a thing! And sellers are using sneaky tactics to fool customers...
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#USB #FlashDrive #Scam - Наука та технологія
Next video: I got sued by 1TB flash drive makers
Haha 😂 it would be in the trending
That cracked me up lmaooo
They would have to first show up to court, thereby placing them in the line of fire for many many other lawsuits and cease and desist orders from many other bogus counterfeit products they sell and fly by night.
🤣
@@crisnmaryfam7344 yup. welcome them to court for evidence discovery. the fraudsters won't dare to go to court ultimately
The human eye can't even see more than 24gb flashdrives.
And your eyes can't see more than the PC with the 8700k engineering sample that yes, you got, installed under a bukkake of thermal paste, using single-channel RAM (w/ two sticks), a "brace"; all installed using a Swiss army knife that thankfully had a screwdriver just to play LoL on a capped framerate.
Sorry, I had to. 🤣
@@aoelp All that and you forget the tweezers..... 😕
Worst of all, no table, and no confidence. Your list needs work Chad!
@@StefanEtienneTheVerrgeRep Damn, I knew I missed some crucial details.
Thanks for reminding me of my lacking, Sir the Verrge PC building expert.
@@aoelp Together only we can prevent Motherboard fires.
@@StefanEtienneTheVerrgeRep unless you're NZXT.
There's whole Facebook and WhatsApp groups where Amazon sellers from China pay for reviews. It's crazy.
that's, .... pretty sad..... Some people's integrity must not be worth very much these days. Right up there with investing advice from TIKTOK.
That's disgusting! Where?
Where?
@@jakesimm5889 LMAO
How much do they pay and where can I find them? Asking for a friend ofc
My friend actually fell for it a while ago... I told him...
GG :-(
I told my friend and he was unbelievably stubborn about it. I was telling him "No, Sandisk doesn't make a 1TB sd card, that random thing you got on Wish doesn't have 1TB on it."
He told me I was wrong because "It says it has 1TB on it" 😐
(This was when the highest capacity was 512GB)
@@dankdopths6955 Oh my god I deal with similar stuff like these with my dad. Bless you man, I feel like committing suicide after hearing shit like these, no joke.
@@triliner254 Honestly... And to think I'm going to have to deal with people like this at my new job. :(
@@dankdopths6955 Yeah...i have a friend like that aswell....fell for those scam Wish phones because they have 5G,512GB storage written on them. I guess some people really think others are retarded by not buying these things at such low price for what they may "offer"
"I just transfer another one to make sure this isn't a fluke.."
Lockpicking lawyer vibes here.. 👌
LPL could unlock the missing storage in 30 seconds.... "Binding on 1 release on 2... and we're done!" lol
I was waiting the whole time if he was gonna explain how scammers make it appear to have 1tb and show the actual capacity but he never did :(
Me too :( what are they doing to the drives to get it to show as 1TB to windows? Also, what happens if you format the drive in windows? Does it then show as the true 25GB ish size or does it still show as 1TB?
Basically, those flash drives contain a small computer implementing the file system. They can just make the firmware of that computer report an arbitrary drive size, and also change to just overwrite old files instead of stopping with "no more space". In principle, you could hack that computer to make it report correct size instead.
I think Linus tech tips made. Vid a while back they pretty much wipe your old files as you run out of space
Well, not "wipe" in any useful way, but instead blindly overwrite data, without removing the old file name from the directory.
@@JohnnieHougaardNielsen Why doesn't the directory get written over too?
Amazon, a tech company that lets this happen, makes me wanna re-think my membership
...
You would think amazon would have anonymous buyers who do some quality testing on products with lots of people buying. I get you cannot do it on everything but at least limit the amount of people being scammed.
I recently became a member..... Already ordered enough for free shipping every time I placed an order, but since becoming as member, I've noticed shipping seems to take longer, as I'm far enough away from a distribution center that next day delivery is but a faint dream.
Font used for that "1000GB" label was a red flag/dealbreaker for me lol
I just wanted to comment saying that your wedding band is dope as hell.
Would it be way less dope if I told you it was actually my mom's old wedding band? 😅😂 Definitely saved me a few $ when I got married!
@@GregSalazar No that makes it even cooler, to be honest! It's a really great unisex design to be proud of! The combination of the knurling and stippling remind me of some of the coolest machining projects I've ever done! Not to mention that the design will be great for hiding the nicks and scratches that inevitably find themselves in such a soft metal as gold.
@@GregSalazar That's way more dope tbh, heirlooms are under-rated.
A very long while ago (when having an external Samsung 60GB was da bomb), there was a heavy influx of fake USB thumbdrives with capacities rivaling those external drives.
At that time, there was a webpage called the FrankenFlash Project where the author warned people of sites like Amazon selling those fake USBs and to download the H2Testw program to verify authenticity and capacity.
The more things change, the more they stay the same and the people just don't learn...
The worst thing is people could actually loose alot of irreplaceable data, what a shitty thing to do to someone
What is amazing is that I made like 4 reviews on Amazon and they blocked me, and there are people doing crappy reviews like these ones and they are also messing things up mixing several countries reviews
Was looking for some cheap flash drives laughed out loud when I saw those 1TB drives for £11, so this is still happening. That's how I ended up here.
Was wondering what happen to your drive ? I have 1tb and used 20gb for video works perfectly fine but after that none of my video will save into the flash drive anymore not even picture , that said my damn flash drive only works under 20gb , peace of shit !
Same 😂😂
@@fansolate bro got scammed 😭
I got fooled by one of these drives as well. A lesson learned, and I'm glad this video exists to warn others. A name brand drive with less space might cost a bit more, but at least it'll actually work.
That candle review🤣 All jokes aside, this is terrible. Imagine if someone who isn't aware writes irreplaceable pictures, videos, etc. to this drive and loses them forever.
My first job in IT was repairs in a local computer shop. You would not believe how many people have no backups. So many times I tried to explain that all storage devices eventually fail. It's not a question of IF but WHEN.
It happened to me -_-
It happened to me too.
@@VTOLfreak What exactly are you supposed to do then? People can't keep buying storage devices from the bloated fake market. Do you have any suggestions on flash drives that actually work?
@@lmnet1849 Personally I have a dedicated external SSD from WDBlue I backup important files such as projects and pictures. The more you use a storage the quicker it will fail. so I only backup occasionally. Not sure its the right answer but thats what I do
The scary thing is that it's plausible enough to make people think it's a dud unit, so perhaps after failing to get a free replacement, they might just go ahead and buy another one.
What's interesting is that all these fake drives are solid metal which 1. Looks expensive and 2. Makes it hard to actually physically examine the drive and check how many chips are hidden within.
Thank you for this video. I wish I had seen this before. I bought that gray one that says “1000 GB” and exactly what you’ve shown is what’s happened. Everything I transfer on to it now is “corrupted” and “unplayable.”
which maker you bought it from?
Another thing to keep in mind when you are buying usb drives from no name manufactures is it may be more than a thumb drive, it could be a ducky that deploys malware onto your system once you plug it in.
As a side note NEVER use random flash drives you randomly find because of this very reason.
I came across promotional drives that came with a lovely layer of malware- over 1GB of keylogger crap.
+1 to Linux.
You should format the driver before use it to remove all those "nice" lock boxes and other things that they come with, which might have hidden cra....
@@jmvneto51 still would not recommend that as the firmware of the device it's self could be a threat as well and normal formatting would not do anything to that.
If I'd got a ducky for that cheap I'd be happy and reprogram it to troll at school
Some time ago, I got a couple of "32GB" flash sticks from one of those scammers. Price vs size was somewhat plausible. What I got was the usual scam with fake 1TB even if I ordered "small" drives instead. Directly to the garbage bin.
They reprogram the controller, if you find out what the controller is and true capacity, you can sometimes reflash it to the actual capacity and reliably use it.
Hey, its right up there with that spoiler I saw that adds 100hp. racing stickers that add 5hp a piece.
Every PC sticker you add on your PC adds another mhz overclock.
@snafu yes but they didn't say it was actual bhp, its virtual bhp which means looks like it has 100bhp more, just like the idiots who try to make a Toyota mr2 look like a Ferrari by adding a body kit. Makes no difference to bhp at all.
That is a 1 TB drive, you just didn't screw with enough confidence.
He should have applied some thermal paste to it, that's why it didn't work.
He didn't use tweezers
He also did not use the wireless rubber antistatic livestrong bracelet.
Well he didn’t have a Swiss Army knife to install it
@@DBLRedRibbon that is true.. though he did forget to use the special USB drive applicator. Yeah, I've got one.
The scammers buy someone's small Amazon seller business in another country (in this case, someone who makes custom candles) then use the purchased business' existing amazon product ID's by editing them to be for these fake 1T or 2T USB flash drives and changing the product id's country code. Amazon needs to use some sort of algorithm that detects some substantial change to the text of a product's name and/or description. Flag it for human review of the previous text vs the altered text from x period ago.
Gotta love how the first 2Tb drive you showed the listing for said the interface was “USB 2.0” which is amazing that they could find a way to keep that relevance shining brightly with the futuristic product they are selling! Winner, winner... whatever!
How about making a follow up video about how these thumb drives are made (spoofed) and another video about "fixing" it to show the REAL capacity of the thumb drive.
Super informative video, crazy to see how these scams work!
Friend of mine was so pleased with himself when he purchased a 2TB drive for 50 USD from Wish, I told him he got ripped off and that it either had nowhere near that amount of space or there would be something else wrong with it. The next day he told me I was right, he had tried to copy a 10GB file and it estimated completion in eight hours.
I bought two 2tb usb drive for $15 each and did the same test as you. The packaging was so cheap that I knew it wasn’t genuine. It was so slow that I gave up transferring some files. I decided to reformat it and check the settings again. It did not read at all. Return both of them back to Amazon. For any external drives or flash drives, you should only buy name brand companies.
Thanks for posting this! I hadn’t heard about such drives, nor about the bogus (well, hijacked) non-English reviews. Great work.
it's so hard to find a good high capacity flash drive. i don't know what to buy now
i don't understand how people still fall for this crap and that stores like amazon still sell them. "marketplace" sellers are a plague. i hate when listings are completely changed to different products like this many times i have gone back in my order history and seen how wildly different sketchy items are now in the list then what i ordered
These are fake reviews. They use your tracking info to make another strawman account and leave a 5 star review, brushing.
Love to see someone promoting Montech cases. They’re underrated.
Thank you very much for this video. It prevented me from buying this crap on Amazon. It makes me question every review on Amazon even more than I have before.
Sadly I know of someone who fell for this scam, no matter how many times I tell him it's fake or that these scams exist he refuses to believe it's a scam
"But it says it's 2tb and I can put stuff on it"
I'll send a video like this showing how the scam works
"But that's not the one I have, mine is legit"
FYI, this exact model is still being sold as of today on Amazon. The candle reviews are still there.
Same at here (Indonesia), it was sold more than 1k at 1 online store. Feels bad for the one that buy it and the one that lost the data inside that fake flashdrive.
1TB MicroSD is about $250 atm, as a benchmark. They're fairly new.
This looks like a 32gb USB 2.0 flashdrive. 5 bucks on NewEgg (for a 3.1 drive)
That is how they get you! It's a big Scam
There is a tool to test for fake thumb drives h2testw 1.4
I was looking for a comment with this. I was surprised it wasn't mentioned
Theres a video by Atomic Shrimp who also tests a supposed 2TB drive, what he did was put a video in the drive and open it to play it on repeat, and beside that he had a .bat file that would duplicate a .txt file full of "123456789" until it reached 8MB.
So what happened was, he played the video, executed the .bat file and the drive began filling up with 8MB .txt's until the video stopped playing because it was being overwritten, in the end the supposed 2TB drive didn't even reach 1GB of actual space.
Amazon is quickly becoming about as trustworthy as Craig’s List
Or wish.
never had an issue with them but then again I see this happen all the time its getting old double checking and sometimes triple checking is so easy these things should be relegated to those who are not tech savvy or those who fell asleep in primary school ITC classes
Ah yes because Amazon shall go through all the hundreds of thousands of products and make sure they are exactly what they say, every single one of them too since the makers could easily fake one and sell the rest as fakes. It’s such a simple task I don’t know why Amazon won’t do it!!1!
I'm not real computer literate. I saw these and read some reviews and they were all from people like me, who don't really know in depth about this. None of them actually showed the storage capacity in a way that satisfied me. So I came here. Glad I did. Thank you, you saved me $40 bucks.
I remember this being a thing years ago. crazy that it's still happening.
gives a whole new meaning to read the reviews before buying.
i usually try to sort by most recent and then read at least the last 10 reviews about whatever it is, I think Amazon needs to control the review system and how the naming and pictures of the products can be changed. and previously sold items can not be so drastically changed versus an updated product.
too often now the product that is currently being offered has reviews that are not even close to the product that is now listed.
Why is amazon allowing this. They are selling crap... so now I wonder how many of my flash drives are fake?
Every time I hear those off brands it reminds me of those fake labels from that episode of the Simpsons, Sorny, Magnetbox, and Panaphonics.
thats literally everything on amazon the amount of random "brands" on there is ridiculous
I once had a suny phone
dont buy from chinese scamming site like aliscammer
I stay away from Amazon, in general. Never bought anything from that site. Amazon barely does anything to remove these scam sellers because they still make their cut... I tried to get them to remove bootleg snes games, a few years back, and they wouldn't.
Now some fake drives does space cycling. When the physical available space used up, it automatically deletes earliest data written, so the latest content written are always valid but older files are corrupted.
Many users and testing software only check latest files/chunks which made those fake drives very deceivable.
I've never had corrupt files like that. My computer always says there is not enough room to transfer files to the drive
According to the atomic shrimp channel, these fake drives have chips inside them (like all USBs) called the controller, which has been reprogrammed using special hacking software to misrepresent the true capacity of the separate storage chip. When you format or query properties, your computer isn’t looking at the storage media itself, it’s interacting with the controller that manages the storage (a good analogy is bit like a police officer trying to find a thief staying in a hotel, but can only communicate via the reception which has the power to mislead or lead him to the officer’s destination).
Sorry but Amazon hasn't been a reputable e-retailer for a few years. I fully expect anything I buy there to be complete garbage
Love your vids, youre one of the tech channels we can trust
Thanks for the continued support!
Thanks for the advise,, too good to be true so decided to check in UA-cam before ordering..
So helpful!! I was about to be fooled but you saved me!! OMG! Thank you for listing all the reputable brands, too! No such a thing, if it's too good to be true!
note to self: check youtube before buying (said product)
Thanks for this video. I recently bought two "2TB" USB drives from Amazon, neither of which worked. The second one was the one you showed that's gray in color and has SD card reviews on Amazon. I don't know why I thought such a cheap drive would work. Both went back to Amazon and I got my money refunded.
bro same
Please add a review that it's a scam.
Technically it's the filesystem reporting that that 38.5GB figure is what's being used, not the drive, because the filesystem thinks that that's what's really there. This is because the file allocation table which stores all the info about the files on the filesystem is usually tucked away and protected. This means it won't generally be overwritten when you overfill the drive and why you see all of what are essentially ghost files because again the filesystem thinks they are there, but when you try to access them it draws a blank. The reason they can't be opened with a hex editor is not because they're corrupt, it's that they simply don't actually exist on the drive.
Is that means the flash drive is broken ?
Thanks for the info Greg, you probably saved alot of people from being scammed
I found one on Amazon that says it's BOTH a hard disk drive AND a flash drive! There is NO SUCH THING!
This is exactly what happened to me. If you go to the failed files and pull up the tab, you'll see that none of the video or audio information has been copied. Both of these sections are blank.
I got scammed by this type of flash drive and lost almost 500gb of data. I'm glad I paid only $2 for it during a sale though.
LMFAO NIGGA U GREEDY
Rubbish candles. Very hard to light.
Another source of aggravation is that most of these sites and sellers don't seem to know the difference between an "iPad" and an "iPad Pro." I keep searching for "external drive for iPad" and getting results that show nothing but either hard drives for iPad Pro or hard drives for Macs and PCs, or there are only flash drives and no hard drives.
Is there any kind of reliable tool to analyze the *actual* capacity of a USB flash drive?
Useful video. I saw these on offer and they seemed too good to be true, but seeing good reviews, I was almost ready to buy.
All these drives are janky as hell thanks for confirming it for me I was wondering why all my files were just copying corrupted
Amazon and eBay both have some issues when it comes to USB flash drives. It’s sad two huge, million/billion dollar companies are allowing such blatant scams on such a large scale continue to exist on their platforms.
Exactly! I don't buy any stuff via internet anymore
storage drives of any variety are those type of products that have to be made by trusted name brands or you will find problems very quickly
2:31 you just show your fingerprints in 4K, somebody might do something not good about it..
Same thing they are doing with RAM. Cheap or discounted RAM are coded which shows 8 or 16GB RAM but it's actually 2 or 4GB RAM.
Problem is they sell enough of these scam drives that DON'T get returned that it's profitable. And once caught they just sign up a new seller account and repeat.
Well that bloody explains why my files keep randomly disappearing
Thanks for bring this scam to our attention
nice 1 Cyril , my 7 year old grandson, bought a 2TB SSD , as a surprise for me, his gran, & him did not tell me about this gift, but when it arrived I knew it was a Chinese fake, but did not have the heart to tell either of them...i think the vast majority of folks whom are plug & play computer users, like me 10 years ago, but i was taken in by the same scammers..
I approaching 70 years old, i never thought i would need to learn even the basics for these damn machines, & I was genuinely surprised , of how I learned so quickly especially regards the hardware side of a desk /laptop. [ RAM CPU etc ].even repair.
it was the fact that i was scammed, that made me sit up, & started to learn a whole lot of stuff, that in the end i have been scam free, because of video's like this, & there are plenty of FREE software progs, that can spot the fakes in a heartbeat.
I still think, the best way to ascertain, if these dirt cheap 2Tb SSD etc are fake, is to find out the average cost on reputable outlets but the BARGAIN CHIP in our brains, mostly wins out .with the phrase what if it is GENUINE '
if you have already bought it, then transfer a very large file/ folder OVERNIGHT, & in the morning the sorry an ' unexpected error meant we cant complete this task ' will await you. along with a smashed cornflakes bowl..
stay safe.
Thanks for showing this kind of video as I myself a victim of this. I bought a 128gb loaded my photos and videos with my family but then when open it the next day. Its all corrupted. Like no photos atleast 1 photo is saved
Thanks for the video
My dad got me this for christmas and i don’t know how to tell him it was a scam 😭
The worst part of this kind of scam is that in my country there are actual 3rd party online shop that sell these shady SDcard/Thumbdrive/Hardrive but with reputable name like Toshiba/Sandisk/Seagate at much cheaper than retail prices and has a ton of 5star reviews but its all garbage cards that might be able to store 128gb but has read/write speed of a tortoise
Thank you so much
I had this EXACT issue and im so GLAD I found this video. I'm returning it to Amazon as we speak! I thank you for this, even if i am seeing it in 2023😅❤
How did they fool windows to think that it actually has 1TB though?
You can reprogram the chip inside as it’s just telling you whatever is programmed to it and not what’s the actual capacity
Thanks for showing us these scams/bad pc listings so we don't get scammed not all heroes wear capes!
How do you know Greg doesnt wear a cape?
They did the same with SSD's too in my country but it didn't take them long to be removed from the shop's page. They were selling "2TB" SSD at the price of a 250 GB Samsung or Intel SSD lol. To be honest it had good reviews and the customers attached images with it actually holding that much data but i wouldn't expect them to last more than 3 months
it's crazy amazon allows sellers to change the product page item like this smh. they enable scammers. they love it.
What are they doing to fool the OS? I would have liked a deep dive on the technical aspect. Is there any software that can dig into it and help figure out how it's able to misreport?
😤😮😲 Thank you for making this video! I just returned that USB drive; I actually both 1 64GB and this 1TB that you said it's a scam. I was surprise when I received it, It was just in the very tiny envelope that you just showed us; and the other one that I bought that's 64GB is in the box and it was well protected. I was a bit concerned, that's why I search here on youtube if anybody have any review on this. That's when I found your channel, thank you so much.
There's been some cases where scammers sell "1tb HDD" then one opened an hdd and saw it's only a damn basic 16gb usb 2.0
Mine is idential and says 1tb !! Unavle to confirm if fake(most likely it is) since my laptop got corrupt 😢
Saved me some stress. Thanks
Saw a lot of 1tb drives on wish for half the average price,it actually worked but after the limit (maybe 16gb) it just corrupted your files,and most ppl didnt know that,so they gave good reviews for that without knowing the truth,its pretty sad
What's sad is one of the big buyers who often fall for these scams are schools and educational programs.
If common teacher or none informed school goes out with a budget to buy a bunch of flash drives for some kids. they are likely not be familiar with drive main brands. They will end up buying a few hundreds or even thousand of these and when they fail chuck it up to user error & ware and tear.
Seen it so many times when performing audits.
I fell for that years ago when I was still in high school.
Not to this extent. I think I spent $5-$10 on it for whatever size it was.
The moment I noticed I couldn't play my files, I just wrote it off as a cheap drive.
Hi Gregg, i bought a 1 TB drive 6 months ago on Amazon, I`m usually quite tech savvy and thought 60pounds for a drive was a great deal(should have known better) just did some of your tests, and i can say it! I got scammed by over 936GB :)! That said i contacted Amazon ( past return policy) and they are willing to refund me once they receive their drive. Glad this video exists thanks for all the help.
some people use sandisk cases and put these in them ive seen
Damn thats sneaky
There are a number of programs that you can run that will tell you the actual size of the drive, I have had a number of sellers removed for selling scam drives. I only buy name brand drives even then I do not buy from companies that do not have a large list of sales.
One drive of mine stopped working and locked made read-only due to incorrect size. There's a way to reprogram the flash/USB controller by software! Just open it up and look for what the little chip says and download the software programmer for it. I revived my drive with the correct size (30.0 GB) and it still works to this day!
I kept seeing these 1TB flash drives on ebay and I knew something was up with them.
The most beautiful part of this all is that there are "closed" Facebook groups that will offer these devices for "free" as long as you give them a 5 star review. They even warn that, as the buyer, you need to wait for about 3 days to up to two weeks before you post a stellar review on Amazon. The rules are very clear about this from Amazon, they can even ban you from posting reviews ever again. Of course the reputation of all these cheap devices, mostly USB-c hubs of questionable quality or a wireless charger and so on... But, like you said Greg, most people read the amount of 5 stars a product get and assume it is a good product.
So useful!
I bought a 1tb USB drive 3 months ago and it said that it was a 3.0 usb but it was'nt so it have a slow transfer rate and the thing that angers me the most is that when moving big files the files becomes corrupted and i cant delete the folder(empty) without formating the USB so i regret it i cant even use it.