OT - Ebay Scammers - USB Drives

[T-Bone]

These fuckwits need to be kicked in the head

A Coworker of mine gave me his 16gb USB drive the other day so I could load a bunch of videos I had onto it for him. He had some crap on it to begin with, so he told me just to format it and load away. I clicked the format and it formatted within 5 seconds... A little too quick considering my 1gb camera card only formats in about 10-15 seconds. I looked it over closely and noticed that it had an awkward little stamp on the USB connector that said 16g.... NOT GB like should be there. I then tried loading some of the videos on to it and it errored a bunch of times. The ones that did manage to load wouldn't even play out of the drive..... My suspicions were right... He got one of the reprogrammed drives that are selling all over ebay and other sites.. The jackasses are taking 256 and 512mb drives and "flashing" them with new programming to fool your computer into seeing 8-16gb. John thought he got a good deal when he spent $70 on this... He got screwed.

For More info, read here: BEWARE of FAKE 1GB/2GB/4GB/8GB USB Flash Drives on eBay

If the "deal" sees too good to be true, it usually is...

[Rick]

These fuckwits need to be kicked in the head

A Coworker of mine gave me his 16gb USB drive the other day so I could load a bunch of videos I had onto it for him. He had some crap on it to begin with, so he told me just to format it and load away. I clicked the format and it formatted within 5 seconds... A little too quick considering my 1gb camera card only formats in about 10-15 seconds. I looked it over closely and noticed that it had an awkward little stamp on the USB connector that said 16g.... NOT GB like should be there. I then tried loading some of the videos on to it and it errored a bunch of times. The ones that did manage to load wouldn't even play out of the drive..... My suspicions were right... He got one of the reprogrammed drives that are selling all over ebay and other sites.. The jackasses are taking 256 and 512mb drives and "flashing" them with new programming to fool your computer into seeing 8-16gb. John thought he got a good deal when he spent $70 on this... He got screwed.

For More info, read here: BEWARE of FAKE 1GB/2GB/4GB/8GB USB Flash Drives on eBay

If the "deal" sees too good to be true, it usually is...

Maybe spreading the news like this and the ebay review will bring enough attention to it to get it stopped. It's amazing the lengths that people will go to to defraud people. It must have taken quite a bit of brain power to figure out how to reflash those to fool a pc, and all of that brain power could have been used to come up with something legit. Dumbasses.

[T-Bone]

If I understand the technology correctly, you have XXX amount of space to work with and each sector is about XXX big. When you compress and divide those sectors up even more, the computer sees more sectors and counts them to add up to 8,12 16gb, but hasn't really investigated the size of those sectors.

[Don]

Any small electronic item is a risk to buy on ebay. Flash drives, and bluetooth headsets are massed produced in Hong Kong and branded with a top name to sell here. Better to spend the extra 10 bucks and buy the small stuff at Best buy or Walmart.

[Playitloudforme]

My son was ripped off for a Playstation 3. Even tho there was Paypal 'protection', Paypal will only honor $200 of the purchase. They've been chasing my son trying to get him to pay the rest (BofA refunded him completely), instead of going after the thief who ran off with not just my son's money but 4 others.

Big item, little items... buyer beware, to be sure.