Won bid for fake 32gb Flash drive - advice?

xanthe

I won a bid for a 32gb usb Flash drive for £18 from a Hong Kong seller who has over 10k positive feedback (please don't say if the price seems too good to be true then don't bid ). Anyway, before I paid I decided to look at his feedback then saw that the majority of his feedback are "private" i.e. you can't see what he sold and how much he sold it for. I did a bit of digging and found this:

http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/xprodeal-ebay-members-battle-fake-flash-memory-seller-using-private-auction-listings-a-long-history-of-fraud-ebay-looks-the-other-way/

It basically said this seller is part of an established con ring.

Now obviously I'm not going to pay. Is there any ways to report this anyway? I'd assume it would be difficult as I have not paid and therefore not received the item and I have not lost anything (apart from a possible negative feedback). Should I contact the seller and send the link to sosflash.com?

pitkin2020

Do you have a lnk to the ebay listing??

xanthe

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180455367491&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT

I know there's not much point getting this seller banned as they'll just register under another name, but I want to do something to at least warn other people of this scam!

frivolous_fay

xanthe wrote: »

(please don't say if the price seems too good to be true then don't bid

Can I say the other thing then?
Read the feedback BEFORE bidding

mtc95

You won't get negative feedback as sellers cannot leave negatives.

cyberbob

mtc95 wrote: »

You won't get negative feedback as sellers cannot leave negatives.

No but you will get a Non paying bidder strike if you have 2 or more of these its very difficult to buy anything on ebay as most sellers have there settings to exclude those bidding with 2 or more.

As Fay said you should have read the feedback first

steven_garner

If its deffinatly fake…


Purchase the item, when its delivered pop into your local PC World, asked them to verify its authenticity – open a case in PayPal for item being counterfeit and submit the letter PC World gave you.
PayPal refund ask you to destroy the item – Seller has no item, no money and has lost out on postage… then to “put the cherry on this cake” leave him a BIG FAT NEG!
Do what you want with the memory stick.

If it is fake it will show as “32GB” but it will only be around 1-4GB, to due the way these “hackers” manipulate the file system its not likely to last very long, even if you only put a couple of files on.

On the other hand, my fake Sony memory sticks were 16GB and could hold about 15.4 GB of data and I still use it now.

So the item may or may not be fake/hacked, either way I think you should pay for it – after all you don’t want to get a strike and it will be hard to prove to eBay that its fake/hacked if you haven’t received the product.

Steve.

xanthe

Thanks for the advice everyone. I'll go through all the seller's details next time. I learnt this the hard way I guess.

That sounds like the thing to do Steve, but I don't want to give them my money incase I can't claim it back since all the evidence show that this is 100% a scam.

Here are some new comments:

SCAM!!! after a month! got a 1gb disk with a HACKED firmware to look like 32!!!

16 g was only 2g-13 dollars to send back for refund-scam artist-don't trust

Follow-up: Item is defective,only 4 GB capacity. Tested with H2testw v1.4. Lost GB data!

... you get the gist. :mad::mad: