I have a friend who bought one of these and was convinced it was real, then he told me he backed up all his data on it. I not only had to explain to him that it was fake, but that he had also lost 100's of gigabytes of data. These scams really piss me off.
Why does eBay still allow these to be sold? On the positive side, they're free USB sticks as you can claim your money back. but it's insane this still goes on.
😂😂 man i was shooing on the Walmart app for a flash drive and saw this and went “ this can’t possibly be right “ how and just 12$ ??? How did they fit that much storage is such a small thingy nah let me look up a review “ 😂😂
nope some claim to be located in Norht America or Europe, but still it gets shipped from china, the rating is a much better indicator, as close to 100% and with a couple tens of thousands votes will prevent most of the shit
@@ArtisChronicles Yeah I just look at the usb sides and know which way they should be placed. And I have no clue how he lost it, when he didn't have the USB to start with.
I've gotten screwed (or, rather, people have attempted to screw me) by these things several times. Nowadays some counterfeits are so good that you literally can't tell the difference. One seller in particular lied straight to my face about the fakeness of the product. When you buy flash drives, the first thing you should always do is make sure that you can fill the drive and get back exactly what you wrote: 1. Grab a file large enough to fill the drive. 2. Compute a hash (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, whatever) for it. 3. Copy the file to the drive. 4. Unplug the drive and plug it back in. 5. Copy the file back to the computer. If this process fails at any point, this is enough to consider the drive fake. 6. Compute the same hash as on step 2 on the copy. If the hash is not exactly the same, the drive is either fake or faulty.
I had a guy at my last workplace claiming his friend bought a 10$ 512gb legit drive. I explained to him several times that it most likely was a fake drive like this one. But apparently it seemed more plausible to him to believe that you could get a usb drive like that for 10 bucks.
Way back when 512MB drives were new and costed between $60-$100 I bought one at a store. Took it home, it showed up as 512MB, but I noticed once I passed 256MB the files were corrupt. wrote a quick batch that would copy a 1MB image repeatedly onto the drive to show image 257 and up wouldn't show the image. Got a full refund from the store and bought a 512MB from another store.
experienced this years ago when 256GB micro sd were pretty expensive but not so much on ebay... was indeed a scam but was not aware this was possible with micro sd. got my money back in the end :)
Thank you for debunking the cheap 2TB flash drive scam. Sadly, over 3 years later this scam is still alive and kicking on eBay and Amazon likely due to impulse buys before learning the pathetic truth since "it's only $10 dollars", lol.
Mr. Rapter Thats a joke my friend, it relates to the vram fiasco of the gtx 970, where the last 0.5 gb of vram were so slow they might as well not even be there.
My dad gifted one to me and I was really suspicious about the whole deal and decided to do some research, I'm glad to know I didn't make a terrible mistake by using it
This has been a thing for a long time, I work at an electronics store and people come in all the time and demand 2tb flash drives, and dont believe me when I try to explain to them this scam D:
Nah Id rather add an extra function to the usb. Like send alt+f4 after a set interval. Not sure though if one USB can simultaneously be a keyboard and an external memory device.
The scam in the video is an obvious one. The problematic scams are the ones selling a reasonable capacity like 16GB for a reasonable price like $8 when in fact the capacity is only 2GB or 4GB. Only the latest 2GB or 4GB written are working because the USB controller is in a loop: the new data overwrites the old one.
I have noticed on eBay and Amazon that these 1TB or 2TB sticks have some additional notes that claim a minimum size of 8GB. They then go on to warn about errors. It’s still a scam, perhaps they use this to stop returns? Here is one example from an Amazon 1TB stick: “The capacity and speed of these Flash Drives can vary with a minimum of 8GB usable storage capacity and upwards, the Flash Drives may display more memory being available but errors may occur once the maximum usable capacity has been reached.” I have reported some of these to Amazon, but I think they just ignore me.
I saw an ad on Facebook for the same offer. I needed to look to the internet about it and sent me to you. Thanks for the details. Well done. I now continue to be watchful on B.S. like this flash drive.
I don't understand scammers like this. Why not just sell it as a 16GB stick for $8? That's a fairly reasonable price. You could make a decent amount selling these things legitimately, why lie? They're obviously not selling many by faking it if they dropped the price by 20% in a short space of time.
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Different cultures have different relationships with the truth. It's a western christian thing to value honesty. Islam encourages them to lie to non believers and I don't want to be racist but I think Chinese naturally try and screw people over and expect to get screwed over it's like haggling sort of.
A LOT of flash drives on ebay are scam. They often take flash chips that don't pass QC and make them whatever size. I had a 16GB drive that was only 2GB in reality. I had a 4GB drive with the last 200MB being corrupted, so it probably didn't pass QC. TEST BEFORE USE, ASK FOR REFUND!!!
I have a 128 gb sdxc in my phone, bought from a reputable retailer, and its a uhs3. yeah, it cost me. I also caught some 256 gb micro flash drives, usb3.1. they were 30$ each on sale. got those at a reputable office supply chain. they are legit. Nice for plug and forget, no need to remove they are almost flush mount.
I'm very tech savvy and they got me. But hey, I'm 46, my first hard drive was 100mb. If you wanted a 1mb Ram upgrade it would set you back a good $55. From my perspective, memory has gotten incredibly large and cheap. This just seemed like more of the same, some new recent algorithm or process that was at least plausible.
What is awful is that I got scammed like this, and the scammer kept saying that I was angry because I don't know how to use flashdrives on a computer and he kept saying he would pray for me. Like, WTF? I searched for months for a tool to fix the issue, and while there was a tool to find the actual size of the drive, there was no tool to fix it, which means it's easy for scammers to just get away with this. When buying something that looks too good to be true, look at the seller's ratings and reviews. It will often reveal if it's a scam or not.
When flash drives first came out, I bought a few on ebay, and learned the hard way just how bad of a deal they are; I only buy brand name ones, from reputable dealers, now...
I don't think I would ever consider buying anything computer off of Ebay. I have a difficult time buying something off of Amazon if I'm not buying from Amazon.
Thank you for this video, I live in South Korea and one of their online shops had a "Lenovo" 2TB for $40, thank God I received a text from the seller saying due to demand they don't have inventory, so I told him to cancel my order and I did my research and discovered your video, thank you.
you save me from getting scammed! Thank you! I almost fall on eBay, but I read the description and it said 2tb real 32gb and that was made me wondering what does that means. So I asked a question to the guy and he told me that I will only be able to save 32 gb on the USB but on the system it is going to appear like it has 2tb of space. Why would I want to buy a 2tb memory which is really a 32 gb?
I got scammed for a 250GB flash drive. How can I tell the actual size of the drive? Add 1GB video at a time until videos quit playing (like you did)? Can I "unspoof" it?
Some adverts are hilariously honest with such great lines as "factory upgraded to 2tb" while another states clearly the actual size and how it shows up and that it can damage files .....under 200 different pictures of it clearing showing a "2TB" Flash drive.
I keep seeing 16GB (2x8GB) RAM modules for sale on Ebay at Buy It Now price of under $20 even though real ones are selling for over $50. The seller accounts are almost always new with zero feedbacks.
It's kinda weird how if it's too good to be true, it usually is. However, I bought 5 X540-T2 10GbE networking cards which are normally $700 for $100 (I saw some for $300 on eBay, but that was still too much for me), and they all operate at full speeds and they are still running just fine. So, perhaps it's not always if it's too good to be true it probably is.
I have a client that is constantly buying these scam items. I have repeatedly told him to call me before making these purchases but he somehow believes that I'm the one who is being "less than honest". For the life of me, I can't figure out why he keeps coming back to me. His "2TB" flash drive for 4.49 is 16GB and his 39.99 1080 TI is.... well..... it's not. I've been showing him your videos as proof. I do look forward to seeing what "new technology" he brings in though. Keep up the good fight sir, I love your work!
I bought one advertised on Facebook from BKH. Using Fastcopy, I tried to copy several hundred gigabytes to the flashdrive. It stopped at just a little over 28 gb. I tried copying a lot pictures using the Windows 10 copy feature, it appeared to be working, but I found that all the files are unreadable. Thus, the first approximately 28 gb are readable; anything past that may appear to be on the flashdrive, but it is actually not there.
i cant believe this is going on, search 2 tb flash and the first amazon listing shows a flash stick while the reviews and questions are about a christmas stocking. How is this allowed?
Protip: When plugging in a USB device in a horisontal port, make sure that the USB logo is on top. This always ensures that you'll plug it in the correct way. On verical port there is no standard, but if you can see the port's plastic part you can line the plug's plastic part on the opposite side. This also works if the plug is missing the USB logo. If you can't see the port and it is in vertical orientation, you're out of luck and still have to try to plug it in in both orientations (worst case scenario). If you happen to have a USB-C port on the host device you can bypass this problem, provided that the client device also supports type C. If you use type B, the port will have a specific shape, which ensures that you'll get it in at most with 2 attempts and it is on the client device anyway which usually makes it easy to see the port on the device. Edit: One letter
Unfortunately, my PC and laptop both have horizontal ports that are the opposite way around, so the rule doesn't hold. I think I get about a 60-70% failure rate plugging a usb in the right way. lol
but these drives aren't the big problem, cuz most of us know that it's impossible for it to be 2tb at 15 bucks, the problem are the ones that say 64 or 32gb but in reality are 8 or 16 gb, these are the real scam for most people
Well crap! 6 years later and I just bought one for (UGH) $40 off Amazon. I figured Amazon was pretty trustworthy. Is there a way to determine or discover the actual space? Says I've used 499GB, but I noticed recently having trouble playing some of the MP4 files and adding more content takes forever... UGH
there are hardware scan testers that will write and verify onto a drive to check its actual content. Be aware that it takes FOREVER on large drives H2testW, USB Stick Tester, MediaTester, etc...
i recommend you to buy them through paypal And then open a dispute because data gets corrupted in it, give some easy profs, (recording with free OBS) and request a refund. You will get a 10-12gb pendrive for free. Do it and punish those scamers
First off, I will openly admit I do not get along with computers and they don't like me either, so I am not extremely knowledgeable when it comes to stuff like this. That said, wish I had seen this video a month or so ago because I too got scammed. I purchased a 2TB flash drive from a Chinese dealer that had good marks (ratings, whatever they're called) and yes, I spent about $9 or so for the drive. I waited about a month for it to arrive, and when it did, I immediately tried to transfer a rather large amount of data to it, just over 500GB. First try failed, received error messages that data files were corrupted, but they worked fine on the computer I was transferring them from, tried again, same results. Did some online research and found it could be the file system, which was exFAT. Reformatted the drive to NTFS as suggested by the articles I read, several of them. Same issues after several more attempts to transfer the same files, each time different files were "corrupted." Finally I gave up and filed a complaint with eBay and requested a refund. That's when I found out the seller was no longer on eBay, apparently the seller was removed by eBay. Guess the seller got caught scamming, so now I'm wondering if I'll even get a refund. You learn something new everyday, to day I learned I got snookered. And people wonder why I don't trust ordering from eBay.
I honestly thought you were more cautious than this. If you ever get your hands on something that is really fake and its clearly been altered with beeing spoofed to a bigger size. I mean,the drive could very much contain a exec that could sniff out or send back to the pogrammer. The seller could get information about your pc,your network set up that could be critical info of beeing hacked.
I bought a webcam that they said was 12MP 1080p for like $10 off a Chinese site, turns out it was 640x480 when I got it. it worked so there was no way I could return it. So I learned my lesson when it comes to things too goo to be true. lol
the shit that people fall for :( and the possible data loss. if i look at this, if it at least would stop the file transfer when it ran out of space, but it seems it keeps going, but the files aren't there then. :(
Well heck, even 128GB flash drive I bought out of curiosity turned out to be scam and it's actual capacity was about 25GB. Not bad tho considering the price after repartitioning to 25GB, except that slow write speed makes flashdrive borderline useless unless I have all day to copy stuff there.
This would've been nice to know a year ago before I bought those dumb fakes off Wish. I didn't even know you could spoof drives to make them appear as a different capacity. I formatted it and thought, "Well, it still says it, so it must be good..." Probably means my 500GB Huawei Micro SD in my phone is also not even close to 500GB... which would explain why my pictures "auto-corrupt." How disappointing, could've saved like 50 bucks.
Anybody wanting to use cheap slow flash ram for a backup is definitely inexperienced with flash ram. Imagine how long it would take to transfer 2 TB of data at old cheap flash drive speeds?
Buy them all, file complaints against the sellers, receive refunds, turn around and sell them as the size they actually are for more than you paid for them.
instead of buying them and fueling the actual reason they keep making those you could easily explain how it's not possible for someone to make something that is THAT cheap (goes for nearly every piece of hardware that is "too good to be true") and tell ppl to report those items to ebay. (you don't need to put your hands in a fire to explain ppl fire is hot)
you can "put together" 1tb usb drives for around $150. get an msata m.2 drive with one of those m.2 to usb enclosures. I went a bit on the extreme side and did the nvme route to usb c but works great. It's bigger than regular flash drives but also orders of magnitude faster
What if you know it's a scam? If you test the drive and file an "item not as described" dispute, you can probably turn it around on them and get it for free. There's no guarantee of how big a drive you'll actually get until you test it, but you can't complain about free. Plus you get to waste a scammer's money.
Well done for exposing this. BTW I've suffered a scam with an allegedly "exfat-only" USB-HDs, priced about half what such a drive should be. Basically, it doesn't work. I suspect the "exfat-only" idea is silly.
I knew it was fake, but I bought one on ebay, then applied for a refund. That costs them money to send to me, and then ebay takes the refund out of their account. Like the craigslist scammers, where they send me a fake check, it takes them time and money, and they don't get anything.
For such a big issue to consumers, what is ebay doing about this? Seems like they are making a minor effort so they can say they are trying while ignoring the mass scale of it for the profit.
Just had a coworker show his off to me...and found this while investigating. I had a hunch it was bunk when he said it was 7 bucks. I won’t tell him. He’s happier not knowing.
I saw an ad for this kind of product on Facebook. There was alot of people in the comments saying how it worked, they clearly didn't load more than a few GB onto it before they commented. I tried to report it to facebook, but they surprisingly didn't have any report category for scams or fraud, they only had a category for "spam" which sounds much less serious than a scam. And the worst part as it was a legitimate promotion, like, someone manually reviewed their ad and let it get onto facebook. Oh, and it said it was waterproof too!!! xD It was the same style that you have there, with no cap.
sebianoti Not to worry my friend they made TEN bucks off the video :D What matters is alerting people so they dont spend their hard earned 9 bucks on a fake drive and drive to starbucks instead so they spend them there. _This PSA was brought to you by Starbucks, keep drinking our coffee_
@@AngelGomez-if5un No, it is not about the money. It's about getting the scammers at least some consequences. I bought a very cheap 64GB microSD years back from ebay and got scammed, asked for a refund, and they started asking me to leave a positive review and promised to ship a "tested, working one" while claiming they "did not know that the supply was flawed". I of course declined the offer and definitely did not leave a positive review. I had to threaten them with ebay's "escalate dispute" button to get them to pay back my whatever change I spent on the thing.
There is this type called Jetzz cost $60 and now I lost 60+ GB of files I'll never get back. I opened up the device and there was nothing inside! So where did my data go?!
I found a 2TB flash drive on the Walmart website that just looks like a wireless mouse plug. Thankfully, I'm not stupid enough to actually fall for that bull, but I can't believe they could actually get away with that.
$15 2TB usb in order to work well try not to copy the whole folder get copy about 200G at a time or maybe less untill you get to fill up your space but don't forget to run a scan to do automatic fix errors and bad sector.
Bought two from Rdplummy on facebook, it broke after transferring a bunch of movies over, said destination was corrupt and now it won't even show up anymore. Lame.
Why not do a H2testW check to see it's actual size? It takes awhile, longer the more exact you want to be, but you can easily know within 5GB of the actual size
I don't think the scammer necessarily needs to do anything to the controller. The FAT file system contains size information which is possible to modify without any special tools and I'm not sure windows is going to check the physical size. Could you check the drive with your favourite partitioning software?
i got scam by 2tb , and the most depressing is only store 40gb and i cannot delete any files on it , and then no refund . Then i decided that i not would buy online again because its fuck up.
I do not understand this nor how people get fooled by these scams today. Honestly: If something sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. Just buy from Newegg or another reputable seller and refuse to give the scammers any of your hard-earned money, full stop.
Now this is the con of using "2TB" scamdrive: You can't use it as a bootable media, as if it will damage your drive, but can fix by reformatting in Diskpart. Second is that on some TVs, it'll not support exFAT (which is mostly the filesystem of those scamdrives), means you must reformat to NTFS/FAT32 or other compatible filesystems. Edit: Well, you can use it as a bootable drive, but only Linux ISOs. Currently, I have Ubuntu boot drive, using Etcher on Debian 11.
I fell for this 5 years ago when I was new to the PC world, I got a 256 GB drive for $5, never worked right and I did not know why. later after learning to build PCs, gaming and learning so much stuff, I found a program to test hard drives space, think it was called cylog, and it turned out to be a 8gb Drive lol
I have a friend who bought one of these and was convinced it was real, then he told me he backed up all his data on it. I not only had to explain to him that it was fake, but that he had also lost 100's of gigabytes of data. These scams really piss me off.
that's sad :(
Oh dear! I would totally die trying not to die laughing, if I was in your position!
BoardOfCircuit He also needs to learn what the term 'backing up' is in that case also!
100gb of porn loss is not a biggie honestly :)
That's ssad
Buying a flashdrive from ebay is like borrowing a condom from a stranger.
lol, that comparison! I wouldn't even *borrow* a condom from a friend XD
HAHAHA!!!BORROW A CONDOM???FCK CONDOMZ!!!
Reminded me of a Seinfeld episode.
yeah it's not like ebay is one single shady internet store, tons of reputable retail chains have stores on ebay.
still better than no condoms
Why does eBay still allow these to be sold? On the positive side, they're free USB sticks as you can claim your money back. but it's insane this still goes on.
Refunded even if not paid via PayPal?
Kek
Even same for Shopee...
ďd
I have bought 7 USB 2 TB flash drives and successfully back up 4 computers. They work great. Also they were less than 10 dolloars.
Steve.. oh Steve. This is a 2TB drive. You just need windows 12 to use the full capacity
nonono, he needs Windows 9. That's why they never released it, because then it would reveal all of the price gouging tech companies do.
He must download more NAND flash storage so he can install it on that drive to unlock that capacity.
Pryce Newberg they did release it, you could have downloaded it but they took it down
The extra 2TB are DLC
He needs to delete system 32.
I am glad someone is taking the effort to try to keep people aware of scams. Keep up the good work, would like to see more of these types of videos.
I... wish I had looked into this twetny hours ago. Moral of the story: don't shop online at 2am.
😂😂 man i was shooing on the Walmart app for a flash drive and saw this and went “ this can’t possibly be right “ how and just 12$ ??? How did they fit that much storage is such a small thingy nah let me look up a review “ 😂😂
I heard that the human eye can't see more than 10GB anyways. So having a 2TB is just a waste.
Foot in mouth moment, clicked the wrong reply.
lol no worries :)
Lol...I get it....I think
Ha ha ha ha haaaaaa
Cringe as hell
AMD logo on the box behind the monitor RYZEN ???
Yes, reviewers have them now.
yup
That's not there.
Gamers Nexus yup its not there i didnt see anything
Doesn't look like anything to me
eBay needs to start cracking down on this type of garbage that's on their site.
Strider it's not hard to spot it, I've used ebay for years and never got scammed
Just click "North America" in the filters on the left side while searching. That will eliminate all the garbage.
nope some claim to be located in Norht America or Europe, but still it gets shipped from china, the rating is a much better indicator, as close to 100% and with a couple tens of thousands votes will prevent most of the shit
If a seller lies about their physical location, it's instant buyer win in an eBay claim.
eBay don't care.
So you are telling me that my 2TB of Porn are gone?
The comment matches the channel avatar perfectly!
There still should be about 10Gb left, just hope that it hasn't only saved the 'acting' bit at the start of each video. :)
TheLegend27 not having an external drive dedicated to porn, what a casual.
if you have 2 tb then i know you have a backup drive ;)
TheLegend27, who did you kill for that username?
"Plugged it in the wrong way twice, as is the standard with USB." I lost it, haha! And it's so true!
HP Mønsted I honestly never have that problem
@@ArtisChronicles Yeah I just look at the usb sides and know which way they should be placed. And I have no clue how he lost it, when he didn't have the USB to start with.
Hey Steve, wanna move that box a little further out so we can see it?
Tech innuendo LMFAO
Which one?
AMD one behind the Laptop
Mebbwebb He bought at on ebay too and only got a quarter of the box...
I've gotten screwed (or, rather, people have attempted to screw me) by these things several times. Nowadays some counterfeits are so good that you literally can't tell the difference. One seller in particular lied straight to my face about the fakeness of the product.
When you buy flash drives, the first thing you should always do is make sure that you can fill the drive and get back exactly what you wrote:
1. Grab a file large enough to fill the drive.
2. Compute a hash (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, whatever) for it.
3. Copy the file to the drive.
4. Unplug the drive and plug it back in.
5. Copy the file back to the computer. If this process fails at any point, this is enough to consider the drive fake.
6. Compute the same hash as on step 2 on the copy. If the hash is not exactly the same, the drive is either fake or faulty.
I had a guy at my last workplace claiming his friend bought a 10$ 512gb legit drive. I explained to him several times that it most likely was a fake drive like this one. But apparently it seemed more plausible to him to believe that you could get a usb drive like that for 10 bucks.
Way back when 512MB drives were new and costed between $60-$100 I bought one at a store. Took it home, it showed up as 512MB, but I noticed once I passed 256MB the files were corrupt. wrote a quick batch that would copy a 1MB image repeatedly onto the drive to show image 257 and up wouldn't show the image. Got a full refund from the store and bought a 512MB from another store.
experienced this years ago when 256GB micro sd were pretty expensive but not so much on ebay... was indeed a scam but was not aware this was possible with micro sd. got my money back in the end :)
Thank you for debunking the cheap 2TB flash drive scam. Sadly, over 3 years later this scam is still alive and kicking on eBay and Amazon likely due to impulse buys before learning the pathetic truth since "it's only $10 dollars", lol.
I just got scammed thankfully I saw some comments on the problem Im searching bcoz of this damn 2tb usb
Yeah don't trust eBay drives, my 4gb (generic Chinese brand name here) 970 only has 3.5 gb What gives
coincidence? I think no !
Dawson Cook the last 0.5 GB is just extra slow, but still available
Thats cause GB->GiB conversion, its not really considered scam these days.
Mr. Rapter Thats a joke my friend, it relates to the vram fiasco of the gtx 970, where the last 0.5 gb of vram were so slow they might as well not even be there.
Probably 4Gb is the capacity before the drive is formatted and ready to use.
My dad gifted one to me and I was really suspicious about the whole deal and decided to do some research, I'm glad to know I didn't make a terrible mistake by using it
This has been a thing for a long time, I work at an electronics store and people come in all the time and demand 2tb flash drives, and dont believe me when I try to explain to them this scam D:
Of course, they are smooth brained boomers
imagine if it's a usb killer :D
then who ever owns it is totally fucked!
Quetzalcoalt If you dont mind selling a 50$ usb flash drive for 10$ then you could fuck up some poor guys 600$ pc.
Dave Sterling it doesn't cost 50$ to make a USB killer 😂 so China could do this very easily
Nah Id rather add an extra function to the usb. Like send alt+f4 after a set interval. Not sure though if one USB can simultaneously be a keyboard and an external memory device.
nipi tiri you could make it act like a USB hub and then 1 drive could be dozens of devices. Also most phones show up as a phone and a storage device.
The scam in the video is an obvious one. The problematic scams are the ones selling a reasonable capacity like 16GB for a reasonable price like $8 when in fact the capacity is only 2GB or 4GB. Only the latest 2GB or 4GB written are working because the USB controller is in a loop: the new data overwrites the old one.
I have noticed on eBay and Amazon that these 1TB or 2TB sticks have some additional notes that claim a minimum size of 8GB. They then go on to warn about errors. It’s still a scam, perhaps they use this to stop returns? Here is one example from an Amazon 1TB stick:
“The capacity and speed of these Flash Drives can vary with a minimum of 8GB usable storage capacity and upwards, the Flash Drives may display more memory being available but errors may occur once the maximum usable capacity has been reached.”
I have reported some of these to Amazon, but I think they just ignore me.
A 2tb hard drive is almost $100. I'd imagine making that much smaller would cost a pretty penny
I saw an ad on Facebook for the same offer. I needed to look to the internet about it and sent me to you. Thanks for the details. Well done. I now continue to be watchful on B.S. like this flash drive.
I don't understand scammers like this. Why not just sell it as a 16GB stick for $8? That's a fairly reasonable price. You could make a decent amount selling these things legitimately, why lie? They're obviously not selling many by faking it if they dropped the price by 20% in a short space of time.
Different cultures have different relationships with the truth. It's a western christian thing to value honesty. Islam encourages them to lie to non believers and I don't want to be racist but I think Chinese naturally try and screw people over and expect to get screwed over it's like haggling sort of.
Wait, fake DVI cables exist? Man, I learn something new everyday.
Almost, is that a Ryzen box behind the monitor? Because I'm pretty sure it is.
I'm hoping you reported the fake merchandise to PayPal to get a refund & E-bay to have the seller's account suspended.
A LOT of flash drives on ebay are scam. They often take flash chips that don't pass QC and make them whatever size. I had a 16GB drive that was only 2GB in reality. I had a 4GB drive with the last 200MB being corrupted, so it probably didn't pass QC. TEST BEFORE USE, ASK FOR REFUND!!!
I have a 128 gb sdxc in my phone, bought from a reputable retailer, and its a uhs3. yeah, it cost me. I also caught some 256 gb micro flash drives, usb3.1. they were 30$ each on sale. got those at a reputable office supply chain. they are legit. Nice for plug and forget, no need to remove they are almost flush mount.
I'm very tech savvy and they got me. But hey, I'm 46, my first hard drive was 100mb. If you wanted a 1mb Ram upgrade it would set you back a good $55. From my perspective, memory has gotten incredibly large and cheap. This just seemed like more of the same, some new recent algorithm or process that was at least plausible.
Well, I was looking at them seriously for awhile myself!
What is awful is that I got scammed like this, and the scammer kept saying that I was angry because I don't know how to use flashdrives on a computer and he kept saying he would pray for me. Like, WTF? I searched for months for a tool to fix the issue, and while there was a tool to find the actual size of the drive, there was no tool to fix it, which means it's easy for scammers to just get away with this.
When buying something that looks too good to be true, look at the seller's ratings and reviews. It will often reveal if it's a scam or not.
When flash drives first came out, I bought a few on ebay, and learned the hard way just how bad of a deal they are; I only buy brand name ones, from reputable dealers, now...
I'd like to see a class action law suit against the people who perpetrated this fraud.
I don't think I would ever consider buying anything computer off of Ebay. I have a difficult time buying something off of Amazon if I'm not buying from Amazon.
Thank you for this video, I live in South Korea and one of their online shops had a "Lenovo" 2TB for $40, thank God I received a text from the seller saying due to demand they don't have inventory, so I told him to cancel my order and I did my research and discovered your video, thank you.
I saw one of these on Amazon and Walmart too... nasty scam indeed.
you save me from getting scammed! Thank you! I almost fall on eBay, but I read the description and it said 2tb real 32gb and that was made me wondering what does that means. So I asked a question to the guy and he told me that I will only be able to save 32 gb on the USB but on the system it is going to appear like it has 2tb of space. Why would I want to buy a 2tb memory which is really a 32 gb?
I got scammed for a 250GB flash drive. How can I tell the actual size of the drive? Add 1GB video at a time until videos quit playing (like you did)? Can I "unspoof" it?
Some adverts are hilariously honest with such great lines as "factory upgraded to 2tb" while another states clearly the actual size and how it shows up and that it can damage files .....under 200 different pictures of it clearing showing a "2TB" Flash drive.
Why would anyone give this a thumbs down? This is very informative
THe scammers themselves
I'm just amazed they don't come loaded with malware.
I keep seeing 16GB (2x8GB) RAM modules for sale on Ebay at Buy It Now price of under $20 even though real ones are selling for over $50. The seller accounts are almost always new with zero feedbacks.
Love that just below the video is a sponsored section featuring 2TB flash drives on eBay.
It's kinda weird how if it's too good to be true, it usually is. However, I bought 5 X540-T2 10GbE networking cards which are normally $700 for $100 (I saw some for $300 on eBay, but that was still too much for me), and they all operate at full speeds and they are still running just fine. So, perhaps it's not always if it's too good to be true it probably is.
I have a client that is constantly buying these scam items. I have repeatedly told him to call me before making these purchases but he somehow believes that I'm the one who is being "less than honest". For the life of me, I can't figure out why he keeps coming back to me. His "2TB" flash drive for 4.49 is 16GB and his 39.99 1080 TI is.... well..... it's not. I've been showing him your videos as proof. I do look forward to seeing what "new technology" he brings in though. Keep up the good fight sir, I love your work!
I bought one advertised on Facebook from BKH. Using Fastcopy, I tried to copy several hundred gigabytes to the flashdrive. It stopped at just a little over 28 gb. I tried copying a lot pictures using the Windows 10 copy feature, it appeared to be working, but I found that all the files are unreadable. Thus, the first approximately 28 gb are readable; anything past that may appear to be on the flashdrive, but it is actually not there.
i cant believe this is going on, search 2 tb flash and the first amazon listing shows a flash stick while the reviews and questions are about a christmas stocking. How is this allowed?
Protip: When plugging in a USB device in a horisontal port, make sure that the USB logo is on top. This always ensures that you'll plug it in the correct way.
On verical port there is no standard, but if you can see the port's plastic part you can line the plug's plastic part on the opposite side. This also works if the plug is missing the USB logo. If you can't see the port and it is in vertical orientation, you're out of luck and still have to try to plug it in in both orientations (worst case scenario). If you happen to have a USB-C port on the host device you can bypass this problem, provided that the client device also supports type C. If you use type B, the port will have a specific shape, which ensures that you'll get it in at most with 2 attempts and it is on the client device anyway which usually makes it easy to see the port on the device.
Edit: One letter
Unfortunately, my PC and laptop both have horizontal ports that are the opposite way around, so the rule doesn't hold.
I think I get about a 60-70% failure rate plugging a usb in the right way. lol
but these drives aren't the big problem, cuz most of us know that it's impossible for it to be 2tb at 15 bucks, the problem are the ones that say 64 or 32gb but in reality are 8 or 16 gb, these are the real scam for most people
Well crap! 6 years later and I just bought one for (UGH) $40 off Amazon. I figured Amazon was pretty trustworthy. Is there a way to determine or discover the actual space? Says I've used 499GB, but I noticed recently having trouble playing some of the MP4 files and adding more content takes forever... UGH
there are hardware scan testers that will write and verify onto a drive to check its actual content. Be aware that it takes FOREVER on large drives
H2testW, USB Stick Tester, MediaTester, etc...
Ebay will give money back and close them down so return it and let ebay know.
What a fascinating scam. I did not expect it to appear to be 2GB in the finder. That's pretty clever.
i recommend you to buy them through paypal
And then open a dispute because data gets corrupted in it, give some easy profs, (recording with free OBS) and request a refund.
You will get a 10-12gb pendrive for free.
Do it and punish those scamers
First off, I will openly admit I do not get along with computers and they don't like me either, so I am not extremely knowledgeable when it comes to stuff like this. That said, wish I had seen this video a month or so ago because I too got scammed. I purchased a 2TB flash drive from a Chinese dealer that had good marks (ratings, whatever they're called) and yes, I spent about $9 or so for the drive. I waited about a month for it to arrive, and when it did, I immediately tried to transfer a rather large amount of data to it, just over 500GB. First try failed, received error messages that data files were corrupted, but they worked fine on the computer I was transferring them from, tried again, same results. Did some online research and found it could be the file system, which was exFAT. Reformatted the drive to NTFS as suggested by the articles I read, several of them. Same issues after several more attempts to transfer the same files, each time different files were "corrupted." Finally I gave up and filed a complaint with eBay and requested a refund. That's when I found out the seller was no longer on eBay, apparently the seller was removed by eBay. Guess the seller got caught scamming, so now I'm wondering if I'll even get a refund. You learn something new everyday, to day I learned I got snookered. And people wonder why I don't trust ordering from eBay.
I honestly thought you were more cautious than this. If you ever get your hands on something that is really fake and its clearly been altered with beeing spoofed to a bigger size. I mean,the drive could very much contain a exec that could sniff out or send back to the pogrammer. The seller could get information about your pc,your network set up that could be critical info of beeing hacked.
We already checked it and used it on a disposable system.
I bought a webcam that they said was 12MP 1080p for like $10 off a Chinese site, turns out it was 640x480 when I got it. it worked so there was no way I could return it. So I learned my lesson when it comes to things too goo to be true. lol
the shit that people fall for :(
and the possible data loss.
if i look at this, if it at least would stop the file transfer when it ran out of space, but it seems it keeps going, but the files aren't there then. :(
I transfered music album files and the songs would start disappearing.
I love how there are a lot of people still using the old classic media player.. love it.
illuminati confirmed, notice in the lower middle under the monitor there's a AMD Ryzen box :)
Otto Eliasson you mean ryzen review confirmed ; D
I got a "sponsored" bar under the video advertising "2tb Flash drives".
*mixed signals*
RYZEN BOX?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
yep its the rizen 1000% sure
Well heck, even 128GB flash drive I bought out of curiosity turned out to be scam and it's actual capacity was about 25GB. Not bad tho considering the price after repartitioning to 25GB, except that slow write speed makes flashdrive borderline useless unless I have all day to copy stuff there.
This would've been nice to know a year ago before I bought those dumb fakes off Wish. I didn't even know you could spoof drives to make them appear as a different capacity. I formatted it and thought, "Well, it still says it, so it must be good..."
Probably means my 500GB Huawei Micro SD in my phone is also not even close to 500GB... which would explain why my pictures "auto-corrupt." How disappointing, could've saved like 50 bucks.
this might be one of your best vids ever. short, informative and helpful
Anybody wanting to use cheap slow flash ram for a backup is definitely inexperienced with flash ram. Imagine how long it would take to transfer 2 TB of data at old cheap flash drive speeds?
Buy them all, file complaints against the sellers, receive refunds, turn around and sell them as the size they actually are for more than you paid for them.
instead of buying them and fueling the actual reason they keep making those you could easily explain how it's not possible for someone to make something that is THAT cheap (goes for nearly every piece of hardware that is "too good to be true") and tell ppl to report those items to ebay.
(you don't need to put your hands in a fire to explain ppl fire is hot)
Very informative, well presented and very credible. Great work. 👍
you can "put together" 1tb usb drives for around $150. get an msata m.2 drive with one of those m.2 to usb enclosures. I went a bit on the extreme side and did the nvme route to usb c but works great. It's bigger than regular flash drives but also orders of magnitude faster
Steve you can just look at the USB "teeth" if you will to find out quickly which orientation to plug it in :P
Well aware.
You are not well aware. quit lyin bro :P
1:00 1:00 1:00 1:00 1:00
Sorry, someone's gotta pick on ya :P
Funny enough, right under your video is 3 sponsored items, one of which is a 2TB flash drive for $39.00.
What if you know it's a scam? If you test the drive and file an "item not as described" dispute, you can probably turn it around on them and get it for free. There's no guarantee of how big a drive you'll actually get until you test it, but you can't complain about free. Plus you get to waste a scammer's money.
I want to see more of this, no one on youtube is doing this, thanks guys
Well done for exposing this. BTW I've suffered a scam with an allegedly "exfat-only" USB-HDs, priced about half what such a drive should be. Basically, it doesn't work. I suspect the "exfat-only" idea is silly.
I knew it was fake, but I bought one on ebay, then applied for a refund. That costs them money to send to me, and then ebay takes the refund out of their account. Like the craigslist scammers, where they send me a fake check, it takes them time and money, and they don't get anything.
And TH-cam is now displaying ads for several types of cheap 2TB flash drives under your video...
In addition to the scam it is very likely that these could come loaded with some sort of malware. Be VERY careful!
Don't tell me fake capacity can be found on SATA hard drive too ??
yep, I've got a couple of 64Gb flash drives and each one of them has only 8 Gb of real capacity. I've paid 20$ for each, not 9$. And now I hate China.
The crazy thing is that ebay knows they are fake but allow them to be sold. Just like most of the perfume and other things on ebay are fake.
For such a big issue to consumers, what is ebay doing about this? Seems like they are making a minor effort so they can say they are trying while ignoring the mass scale of it for the profit.
I enjoyed this. keep it to this kinda stuff and it's more entertaining
totally agree, i buy shit like that just to tear it apart myself haha
Just had a coworker show his off to me...and found this while investigating. I had a hunch it was bunk when he said it was 7 bucks. I won’t tell him. He’s happier not knowing.
I saw an ad for this kind of product on Facebook.
There was alot of people in the comments saying how it worked, they clearly didn't load more than a few GB onto it before they commented.
I tried to report it to facebook, but they surprisingly didn't have any report category for scams or fraud, they only had a category for "spam" which sounds much less serious than a scam.
And the worst part as it was a legitimate promotion, like, someone manually reviewed their ad and let it get onto facebook.
Oh, and it said it was waterproof too!!! xD
It was the same style that you have there, with no cap.
I did the squinty eye meme when I saw these on Amazon. Searched it on youtube and immediately clicked on this video. Thanks.
please tell me you requested a refund lol
9 bucks ffs, they probably did just because it was a scam, but the video is probably going to make them more money than that.
sebianoti Not to worry my friend they made TEN bucks off the video :D
What matters is alerting people so they dont spend their hard earned 9 bucks on a fake drive and drive to starbucks instead so they spend them there.
_This PSA was brought to you by Starbucks, keep drinking our coffee_
@@AngelGomez-if5un No, it is not about the money. It's about getting the scammers at least some consequences. I bought a very cheap 64GB microSD years back from ebay and got scammed, asked for a refund, and they started asking me to leave a positive review and promised to ship a "tested, working one" while claiming they "did not know that the supply was flawed". I of course declined the offer and definitely did not leave a positive review. I had to threaten them with ebay's "escalate dispute" button to get them to pay back my whatever change I spent on the thing.
There is this type called Jetzz cost $60 and now I lost 60+ GB of files I'll never get back. I opened up the device and there was nothing inside! So where did my data go?!
I found a 2TB flash drive on the Walmart website that just looks like a wireless mouse plug. Thankfully, I'm not stupid enough to actually fall for that bull, but I can't believe they could actually get away with that.
$15 2TB usb in order to work well try not to copy the whole folder get copy about 200G at a time or maybe less untill you get to fill up your space but don't forget to run a scan to do automatic fix errors and bad sector.
why cant u let us see that ryzen box behind the laptop? amd showed it.. cant wait for the review..
Bought two from Rdplummy on facebook, it broke after transferring a bunch of movies over, said destination was corrupt and now it won't even show up anymore. Lame.
Why not do a H2testW check to see it's actual size? It takes awhile, longer the more exact you want to be, but you can easily know within 5GB of the actual size
I don't think the scammer necessarily needs to do anything to the controller. The FAT file system contains size information which is possible to modify without any special tools and I'm not sure windows is going to check the physical size. Could you check the drive with your favourite partitioning software?
i got scam by 2tb , and the most depressing is only store 40gb and i cannot delete any files on it , and then no refund . Then i decided that i not would buy online again because its fuck up.
I do not understand this nor how people get fooled by these scams today. Honestly: If something sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true.
Just buy from Newegg or another reputable seller and refuse to give the scammers any of your hard-earned money, full stop.
Now this is the con of using "2TB" scamdrive:
You can't use it as a bootable media, as if it will damage your drive, but can fix by reformatting in Diskpart. Second is that on some TVs, it'll not support exFAT (which is mostly the filesystem of those scamdrives), means you must reformat to NTFS/FAT32 or other compatible filesystems.
Edit: Well, you can use it as a bootable drive, but only Linux ISOs. Currently, I have Ubuntu boot drive, using Etcher on Debian 11.
the 4 people who voted down on the video are definately scammers
...or butthurt buyer's-remorsers.
those 4 people bought one xD
I fell for this 5 years ago when I was new to the PC world, I got a 256 GB drive for $5, never worked right and I did not know why. later after learning to build PCs, gaming and learning so much stuff, I found a program to test hard drives space, think it was called cylog, and it turned out to be a 8gb Drive lol