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[Poddy]

Please help keeping merchants honest.

Last week I uncovered a $100,000 fraud.
Officeworks were unknowingly marketing a 64Gb. USB Drive which was in fact a 32Gb. unit made to look as though it had a capacity of 64Gb. The manufacturer went to very elebrate lengths to disguise the fraud.
Over the course of the week I demonstrated to them that the drive was a fake, they have told me that all of the items have been now removed from sale.
Here is the item in question



If you happen to be in any of Officeworks 150 stores for any reason please check to see if they have actually removed from sale.
should you see any of those fore sale please alert me

In the coming week I intend testing the rest of the Dynastore USB flash drives and I will post the result here

[Poddy]

Update:

Officeworks have removed from sale that item from their 150 stores Australia wide and their online store and their store on eBay.

It just goes to show that a lone voice can achieve justice if the claims can be backed with fact and is persistant

 

[janeababe]

STANDS UP AND CLAPS HANDS TO PODDY!!!

Good Job. Well done. Keep up the good work.... and all that blah blah folk say   

Seriously though, job well done  ...   

[Icyfroth]

Well done, podds 

[Poddy]

Update:
Officeworks informed me that 30,000 units with a retail value of $750,000were returned to their supplier. They also sent me a gift voucher and a thank you letter

[Poddy]

Update:

The 32Gb version of that flash drive is also Fake the actual capacity is somewhat under 16Gb.
Officeworks have now been informed and those flash drives will be withdrawn as well

[Icyfroth]

Good work there, Podds

[Penny]

Interesting!  I actually bought the same 64 gb usb from the reject shop for $20.  My boy's having trouble copying standard video files & some won't copy at all, not sure why, but am about to test it on my lap top for him, & thought I'd look up to see if anything was posted about this product.  Could be related?  Although it say's 64 gb, there's really on 58 gb (a few 100 kb on user file, & guarantee
 file), so not sure where the 6 gig disappears to?  Think I might just return it to Reject shop.  Thoughts?

[Poddy]

Penny, may I suggest that you create a 3.8Gb test file, say a movie, and then make 16 copies of that file on your hard drive numbered 1 to 16.
once you have done that copy the 16 files to the flash drive. I always do that to make sure that a flash drive is not fake. that method works for other capacities as well i.e. 16 Gb drive should take 4 copies.
A very large percentage of drives are made to appear larger than they actually are. Even though they appear to hold their stated amount they are usually either 1/2, 1/4 or 1/8 of their stated capacity. that can be tested by opening each of the files.

The Dynastore drive has an actual capacity of 32Gb or 16Gb
Good luck,

[Alf]

I also bought this from the Reject Shop for $20 just before Christmas and sure enough its fake!  The price was too good to be true but the packaging and Toshiba warranty looked legit... learnt my lesson the hard way as I lost some important files once I went over the 32Gb storage limit.

Poddy, if the 64Gb is actually 32Gb, is there any way to format it so that it becomes 32Gb without the danger of losing files in the future?

[Poddy]

Unfortunately not Alf.  The scam code is burnt into the firmware so when you format the drive it will tell you it is 64 Gb. I have found no way around it

[Alf]

Just to add further to my previous post, the fake Dynatore 64Gb USB Flash drive purchased from The Reject Shop has an actual capacity of 16GB only, with about 14.4GB useable.

You can use the program h2testw 1.4 to determine the actual memory of fake USB drives.  In the case of the Dynastore 64GB USB Flash Drive, it has 30256384 good sectors equivalent to 14,740Mb.

Poddy you are right that the fake capacity is burnt into the firmware.  However, I found a special way to format the USB drive to the actual capacity of 14740Mb.  This method should work for other fake USB drives as well, just enter a capacity slightly less than the actual capacity if unsure.


Open a Command prompt as administrator
Diskpart
List Disk
Select Disk #   (where # is the number of the USB Flash disk)
Clean
Create Partition Primary Size=14740
Select Partition 1
Active
Format fs=Fat32 Quick    (you can change Fat32 to NTFS)
Assign
Exit

You will now have a 14.7GB Flash drive that you can use without the fear of losing data.

[Poddy]

I have a couple of 'fake' devises including Micro SD cards that I will try that method on in the next week or so and will but the results here 

[Frownland]

  good work poddy, i'm quite interested in the results of tests on SD cards as I'm likely to purchase more soon myself . one supplier (i'd rather not say) sent me 4 cards and one failed to read , i place it in another camera and it's fine . it's actually the first SD card fail i've had.