I got outsmarted and conned by a fraudster and situation recently. I was late for office so I was in hurry . I was approached by a person in scooter, I stopped as I thought he was going to ask for directions. He showed me four 32 GB Kingston flash drives in Kingston package and told me some tale about how he acquired them which I do not remember as I was hardly paying any attention and was not interested.
Then he feigned innocence as if he is unaware of what it is worth. He offered me to test them and if I felt that they are good I can buy them.The offer seemed tempting so I decided to test it . So I took all four of them upstairs and broke open one and plugged them.
It showed 32 GB free I formatted it to Fat32 and then I went to Kingston site and verified the seal the seal looked authentic. I tried entering the no. but the china site was not working. So I decided to test it by copying few media files and then disconnecting and reconnecting and see if they were working fine. It worked fine but slow and I was in hurry so I did not further testing.
So I went downstairs where he was waiting and gave him 3 USB sticks back and kept the one just that I have opened. He asked me how much I will pay I said 600 and he bargained for 800 and to buy more but I gave him 600.
Next two days I was happy thinking that it was either good obtained through illegitimate means or it was some Chinese product which is not guaranteed to last long.I told some of my friends and colleagues about this how it is too good to be true.But it was short-lived as two days later when I tried to copy some 2 GB of data to my friends comp it showed nothing on my friend’s comp.
After some research on internet I found out that I have been conned as it was 512 MB drive which has been flashed to show 32 GB.
So bottom-line is if something is too good to be true then it is not true.
Things that saved me from buying extra in hindsight were
- He told me he is from Ghaziabad and I knew Ghaziabad is the biggest fake goods city in the India.
- I did not have lot of money in my pockets I only had 400 so I had to borrow some from building guard.
- The performance of drive was slow.
Things that did not work in my favor
- I was in hurry.
- I underestimated con people thinking they cannot make packaging almost like original with original looking seal.
- The guy’s innocent and suspicious behavior acting was very good.
- I only copied files which were less than 512 MB had I copied a bigger file like movie file I would have found out the truth.
- Most important point is he gave me full control like testing and fixing price so which made it seem like I was in control .
Here are few items to verify fakeness of USB drive :
1.Try using h2testw . It will write the complete size and verify it. This is sufficient condition but it will take long time as it will try to write full size.
2. One faster way would be trying to format it to NTFS if it fails it must be fake .(This is necessary but not sufficient )
3. If something looks dirt cheap think again.
There are lots of other links on internet to detect fake USB drives and lot of people have been conned by EBay sellers.
So after discovering that I have been outsmarted , I was amused at my bêtise, I broke open the drive and to see the insides and saw handiwork of it being tampered .
In case you are wondering how it looks like here is pic of the package
Here is link which shows one :-
http://www.gadget.co.za/pebble.asp?relid=1349
Also check-out the
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