2TB Flash Drive Scam 

Buying a flashdrive from ebay is like borrowing a condom from a stranger.

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.

AMD logo on the box behind the monitor RYZEN ???

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.

So you are telling me that my 2TB of Porn are gone?

Steve.. oh Steve. This is a 2TB drive. You just need windows 12 to use the full capacity

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.

I heard that the human eye can't see more than 10GB anyways. So having a 2TB is just a waste.

eBay needs to start cracking down on this type of garbage that's on their site.

"Plugged it in the wrong way twice, as is the standard with USB." I lost it, haha! And it's so true!

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.

Hey Steve, wanna move that box a little further out so we can see it?

this might be one of your best vids ever. short, informative and helpful

This is a great idea for a series keep up the great work.

Very informative, well presented and very credible. Great work. 👍

I want to see more of this, no one on youtube is doing this, thanks guys

Thanks so much for the heads up. Tech changes so fast!

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

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.

Thank you for your support buddy, keep it up. I Really appreciate your work 😊😊

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.

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.

imagine if it's a usb killer :D

Gotta love that pixio monitor and its wobbly stand. I've got one myself and can't wait to get it on an arm.

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...

Love that just below the video is a sponsored section featuring 2TB flash drives on eBay.

I enjoyed this. keep it to this kinda stuff and it's more entertaining

Funny, I'm getting an ad right below your video for 2TB flash drives on ebay for around $20 lol.

A 2tb hard drive is almost $100. I'd imagine making that much smaller would cost a pretty penny

Great Video Man!

All I wanted to know in 3 minutes! Appreciate it! 😀👍🏻

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.

Yeah don't trust eBay drives, my 4gb (generic Chinese brand name here) 970 only has 3.5 gb What gives

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:

thanks for the heads up GN

I'd like to see a class action law suit against the people who perpetrated this fraud.

Lovin' your Asteroids canvas. :)

Thanks for this info!

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.

more of these please.

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 :)

I love how there are a lot of people still using the old classic media player.. love it.

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.

RYZEN BOX?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

the 4 people who voted down on the video are definately scammers

Thank you for this!

I did the squinty eye meme when I saw these on Amazon. Searched it on youtube and immediately clicked on this video. Thanks.

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?

Thanks for the heads up!

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.

What a fascinating scam. I did not expect it to appear to be 2GB in the finder. That's pretty clever.

Imagine all 2TB files playing completely and he's scratching his head trying to figure out

I got a "sponsored" bar under the video advertising "2tb Flash drives". *mixed signals*

And RU-vid is now displaying ads for several types of cheap 2TB flash drives under your video...

I'm just amazed they don't come loaded with malware.

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 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 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?

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.

Thanks for the PSA!

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

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.

Why would anyone give this a thumbs down? This is very informative

there was an ad for 2TB flashdrives under this video

your the man Gamers Nexus!!!

I saw one of these on Amazon and Walmart too... nasty scam indeed.

2019 Seller: Do you know there is a ten dollar flash drive with 5TB? Me: ...

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

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.

The desk wobbling makes me nervous.

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.

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.

Thought there was something fishy bout them 2 TB flash drives...thanks for the warning

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.

Reminds me of the scams on eBay where they were selling an Xbox box for over $300 and people were scooping it up!

Here's a question, is that ~10GB on your drive stable? I got a 128GB flash drive a few years ago (was pretty sure it was a fake but had to check) and after I did a h2test I found it had 14.5GB real storage. Does that mean I can dump a 14GB file on it safely, or will it end up corrupting?

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.

In addition to the scam it is very likely that these could come loaded with some sort of malware. Be VERY careful!

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.

The ad I got for this was for a 2TB kingston flash drive lol

A tiny flash DIVE...LOL!

I got a 1tb flash drive ad.

wow I'm so glad I looked this up before buying it

illuminati confirmed, notice in the lower middle under the monitor there's a AMD Ryzen box :)

I got an ad for a Kingston data traveler (a 2TB flash drive) lol

These are also on Amazon, for like $60 I fell for it a while ago, I decided to do some research after becoming more knowledgeable in the subject, and realized I got scammed. So that's fun!

I always hate it when I find a cheaper scam the day after the scam.

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 used to work with a guy that bought one. he loved to buy scammy shit like this from random websites that nobody has ever heard of.

I like the way you liked to get scamed just to educate us :) Thumbs up :)

That wobble, Steve. How do you even use a monitor like that...

Getting ads on facebook for this exact same drive currently....selling for 34$.

I think this happens with microSD cards as well. But hey, $7 for ~9GB isn't TOO bad. Not sure hwich is more worrying: the fact that there are so many of these scams out there or that people fall for them.

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.

Somewhat disappointing you didn't do a tear down :P

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 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.