Eish! Fake Hard Drives next…
Many South Africans (and I see a few overseas readers) have been scammed by purchasing the “Transcend 32Gb Flash Disks” that are actually fake – read my article here if you don’t know what I am talking about.
Well I suppose it was only a matter of time until some clever person low life scum thought about really taking advantage of the method of reprogramming the controller chip on USB flash drives and really making some money…by selling a Fake Hard Drive! I saw an article on Slashdot, which posted a link to a translation of a Russian blog and forum telling the sad story about a guy that bought a hard drive at a insanely low price, only to discover that he could only watch the last 5 or so minutes of the movie that he copied to it…
To quote the site:
A Russian friend of mine has posted this absolutely amazing story.
(here‘s the original but it’s in Russian).He works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.
The whole service center was rolling on the floor laughing. This was not the first time someone has brought a disk like that. And the previous drives were also bought in China… They opened up the drive right before the astonished customer’s eyes. This is what they saw:
It’s a 128-MB flash-drive. Working in a “looped” mode – when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting from the beginning. My friend said they’re still trying to figure out how did the Chinese do that. Because the drive reports “correct” file sizes and disk-capacity. And the “looped-overwriting” does not touch the other files present on the drive.
The device looks pretty convincing – lots of tech labels and stuff… The Chinese salesman even saved something to the drive to demonstrate that it “works” in the store.
Here are the pictures:
And what was actually inside…
I guess one could say he really got “screwed” on that deal…
I am still trying to verify if this is real or not, but I would not put it past someone to try and pull this scam on the unsuspecting public, and it will eventually come to our shores…
So once again folks – remember if it is to good to believe … it probably is! Rather pay a little more and buy from a reputable seller… and no “Philemon at the Robots” is not one of them…
(Source: Slashdot, JitBit Blog)
