About seven years ago, I purchased a couple of really inexpensive "1 TB" USB thumb drives via AliExpress.
They were well made, externally. And they each reported a capacity of 10^12 bytes.
I used `dd` to write an infinite stream of noise to them. I remember at least one of these failing to write after 128 MB (that's megabytes), the other didn't signal a failure but just wrapped around to the beginning of the volume after its internal flash was filled to (low) capacity.
I asked for a refund via AliExpress, and offered to pay for return shipping (since I was pretty sure they were not real when I purchased them). AliExpress refunded the money very quickly, the whole amount.
Neither vendor took me up on my offer to return the items. Just as well, as the postage would easily have exceeded the amount I paid for these, but I just felt better about the whole circus by making the sincere offer to return. By no means do I consider my choice to make any sort of ethical or economic sense -- they were ripping people off with these products.
I find it remarkable that hundreds (at least) examples of this simple scam are to be found on Amazon in 2022. But as you can probably tell, I am willfully naive about such things.
They were well made, externally. And they each reported a capacity of 10^12 bytes.
I used `dd` to write an infinite stream of noise to them. I remember at least one of these failing to write after 128 MB (that's megabytes), the other didn't signal a failure but just wrapped around to the beginning of the volume after its internal flash was filled to (low) capacity.
I asked for a refund via AliExpress, and offered to pay for return shipping (since I was pretty sure they were not real when I purchased them). AliExpress refunded the money very quickly, the whole amount.
Neither vendor took me up on my offer to return the items. Just as well, as the postage would easily have exceeded the amount I paid for these, but I just felt better about the whole circus by making the sincere offer to return. By no means do I consider my choice to make any sort of ethical or economic sense -- they were ripping people off with these products.
I find it remarkable that hundreds (at least) examples of this simple scam are to be found on Amazon in 2022. But as you can probably tell, I am willfully naive about such things.