The Fake 1TB USB Flash Drive Scam

well it turns out that if you actually translate all of this there's a button for it so let's do that um these are all for candles this is supposedly a one terabyte flash drive from a company called dory dory pal and it should be pretty obvious from just the packaging alone that this is in fact a scam this is not a one terabyte flash drive yet so many people on sites like amazon and newegg these are reputable e-retailers have fallen for this scam consider this listing here usb flash drive two terabyte i'm not even going to try to pronounce that large usb drive this is like so vague yet there are 100 or so reviews and more or less five stars across the board they're selling this thing for 45 which gives the impression that it is a bit more premium than your average thumb drive however no one has independently verified at least in the reviews that this is in fact a two terabyte capacity drive same goes more or less for this one terabyte drive although i paid quite a bit less than 45 bucks for mine which should be another red flag mind you when sandisk samsung and others are selling their equivalent 128 gig or even 64 gig drives for around 15 to 20 bucks and you're only paying 20 bucks for what a thousand gigabytes there should be some kind of alarm going off in your head that this might be too good to be true and this is where the problem exists because your next thought after that alarm goes off in your head would be to check the reviews right if everyone else says this is a great drive for the price then it must be a great drive for the price problem is most people don't know how to properly test these drives and the sneaky witchcraft that goes on behind the scenes with drives like these is why so many people have fallen for this scam i'm going to show you this video though what is actually happening and why these are a big fat lie stay with me the montex sky 1 is a mid tower primed for your next atx pc build featuring integrated argb with built-in controller and a mesh front panel design for optimal airflow with contact pins for wire free removal fit up to a 360 mil fan rad combo up front or up top and a 120 ml at the rear for maximum cooling and enjoy a modern front i o with usb type c learn more by clicking the link below but first let's open this uh pretty janky packaging here see it's really nothing special it's a bit of bubble wrap inside and this tiny old drive that uh definitely is not capable of a one terabyte capacity and you can see right there on the housing it says 1000 gigabytes so this is not something that's like you know falsely being advertised in the title of the product page etc i mean this is actually manufactured as a quote-unquote one terabyte storage drive it's uh it's pretty ridiculous now in terms of build quality and i feel really weird dedicating a segment of this video to discussing the build quality of a thumb drive but here we go because some people might fall for this it does feel somewhat premium right i kind of don't blame you there uh it has a metal exterior metal shell it's on the lighter side but other than that very minimal design i like the way that it looks it has a large ring here so you can route it through your keys it's i mean it gives the impression of a somewhat decent thumb drive but as you'll see here shortly it is not only super slow but it is also nowhere near that one terabyte advertised capacity so i've got to show you guys this because even i was fooled i did not expect this i kind of feel silly for falling forward i'm sure others have as well but i looked down at the reviews originally right when i filmed the previous uh clip and noticed that a lot of these were in german i figured it was no big deal maybe they were just selling and you know selling overseas for a while and they just entered u.s markets with this uh this scam thumb drive well it turns out that if you actually translate all of this there's a button for it so let's do that um these are all for candles there's so i mean there's even a photo if i had actually done any due diligence at all here you can see this one here is for a freaking candle i think this is a candle most of these are for candles and that is why this listing appears to be so reputable they don't even have anything to do with thumb drive but they're making the thumb drive seem as though it's been praised by hundreds of people that my friends is pretty freaking sneaky and it's happening all over amazon so this is a similar listing 2 terabyte usb 3.0 flash drive again no maker model like there's no brand necessarily behind this that should be a red flag read speeds up to 100 megabytes per second that's a crock of crap 50 price tag and 118 ratings 4.4 out of 5 stars not too bad but let's read the reviews now amazon actually separates these reviews by country so you'll have potentially multiple skus for different countries different regions that could affect qc to an extent and i think that's why amazon does what it does because you might have two different products that are the same on paper but that are manufactured in different ways in different countries uh but these are the top reviews from united states you can see that uh pretty mixed bag here so two people call these trash you've got a few uh five four star reviews one three star kind of jank right i wouldn't want to buy a drive with this kind of review set but we go to reviews from other countries right it says that up top top reviews from other countries these are pretty much all five-star people seem to love this product more or less this person here was uh unsatisfied but uh you know the top four being five stars that's pretty decent right instead we click on translate review here and we notice that uh this person apparently is reviewing looks like an sd card not a thumb drive i don't know of any lg g4 in existence that connects natively to a thumb drive or you know a usb type a port um so this is uh this is again deceiving what they are doing are pulling in these reviews for products that have nothing to do with the product that us in the united states the product that we see here on our amazon.com page and that is inflating these reviews uh to make these products seem like they are much better than they actually are to the general public but enough of that let's go ahead and connect this drive here i really hope that it doesn't crash my system uh let's see what pulls up here i'll switch to the desktop so you can see what i'm seeing here we go slide it over to the right a bit okay so uh it seems pretty good right um you know empty drive now if we go back to let's click on this pc okay so it says here that the drive is a one terabyte drive 976 gigs more or less one terabyte free of 976 gigs well that's freaking huge and that's usually where people stop they plug in the drive they see oh you know almost a terabyte of free space that's what i paid for awesome five star feedback that's all people need to know right there's a lot more to this story so we're gonna test both the speed of this drive and the capacity of this drive we're gonna kill two birds with one stone with this folder right here so this folder should transfer into this drive no problem right it just might be slower than we'd like so let's go ahead and test that let's go ahead and just drag the folder all the way in and just let it do its thing 2 000 years later yeah i changed my mind i don't think i'm going to wait this long for the drive to transfer these files this is this is a snail's pace by comparison and this was advertised mind you as a usb 3.0 drive these are not usb 3.0 speeds we haven't even come close to that it's not like we're thermal throttling or anything of the sword either so yeah the 2 hour and 25 minute time span not gonna wait for that in fact i'll go ahead and tell you what's going to happen once the true capacity of this drive is maxed out which is probably in the realm of one or two gigs more than likely the drive will continue overwriting previous files on the drive until all the files have been quote unquote transferred it gives the impression all the files have been transferred into the drive but if you actually clicked into the drive you'd see that only a small fraction of those files are actually there and i'll go ahead and show you what i mean with a smaller file set so we'll cancel this we'll go ahead and delete what's in here and we'll transfer a few files that i know will probably fit so this one is a 332 megabyte file we'll go ahead and transfer this one we'll transfer this one this is a 268 megabyte file and we'll keep transferring until we reach the point where we can't play back certain files on the drive because they've been corrupted and partially overwritten which is again what these drives will do so let's transfer a cluster of these in jesus could you imagine going back to usb 2.0 speeds like permanently all right so we finally finished transferring enough footage to show you what is actually going on here so now this is the drive again this is the supposed one terabyte drive and you can see there are a few clips in here that don't have little thumbnails little uh previews and these three are corrupted and the reason why they're corrupted is because this drive wrote over some of the video data to make room for other clips so now i'm going to drag another 340 megabyte file into this drive and we're going to see if it corrupts any of these other clips i expect that it will about 20 megabytes per second transfer speeds now i mean it's not terrible but that's not the biggest issue i have this drive obviously so this one is also not play so this one's corrupt as well um that's that's super strange in fact i i imagine a lot of these probably are so even if we can see the thumbnails in some of them they might not all play which yeah these aren't playing either now i just transferred another one to make sure this isn't a fluke and same yep same issue so it doesn't really matter now what's interesting is that it's still trying to read this now i just transferred this this file here is about uh what half a gig i believe it's uh it says it right underneath there so a 468 megabyte video clip and the supposed total you know uh used space on this drive went up to 38.5 gigs from 38. so the drive is still signaling to windows that it's being filled up by this extra space but it's not actually doing that because when we go back to play this video you can see that it's corrupted to the point where it will not play at all what's funny is that none of these that i imported after the fact actually work i was assuming that because they showed the thumbnail previews that these were all valid and viable but they are not i'm wondering where things stopped i think it stopped here i think this is the last viable clip and then after that you've got this break where these three won't even look i can't even import these into a hex editor they're that corrupt and then here i think is where things start to work out yeah which is interesting so what i'm going to do is cut back i'm going to shape back these i know these don't work and then i'm also going to shave these off that obviously don't work and let's see what that size is 24 and a half gigs and apparently we have 951 gigs remaining of course we know that's not true by this point so regardless of the clip that i import after this it will likely be corrupt and if that clip doesn't become corrupted then one of the previous clips that you loaded onto the drive would become corrupt and that is obviously a big issue if you're expecting to be able to load tons of data onto these drives maybe you think that you have and then you go to a very important meeting or something and all of a sudden you can't access any of your files because none of them were ever there permanently to begin with i think i broke the drive so i cleared out all the video files i was trying to bring in new files and and find the limit to find the true capacity of this thing but uh i've cleared out all of the clips except for one uh and it will not open now actually it used to open until i deleted it and tried to pull it back in and now it just keeps saying that the file type is unsupported which we know is not true because it's using the same player that i would normally use in the real folder on my desktop which is you know all these files are in my nvme drive so all these clips work right it's just when they try to read them from the drive things get pretty screwed up so if this doesn't prove it the sham drive is in fact a sham i went through the hassle of renaming it the sham drive i think that that fits accordingly i don't know what will this is clearly a scam people are falling for it left and right and actually it's pretty clever how they're getting around just blatantly exposing the fact that this is not anywhere near a one terabyte capacity drive it's it's easy to just plug it in see what windows you know is being told to show you from the drive and call it a day confirm that it's a one or two terabyte drive but it is it's so far from that in fact i'm willing to bet that it's less than 32 gigs just based on what i've seen here and when you factor in the price i actually pay for this thing you're you're being ripped off because a 32 gig drive or somewhere in that ballpark costs less than what i paid for this thing is like 20 or 30 bucks for this drive the listing was taken down i'm glad that it was so no longer uh people can fall for that one but there are many others like i showed you on amazon and they're using sneaky ways to get around it so be diligent you don't want to overpay even if you're okay with whatever amount of storage you're getting on this drive you can find cheaper ones from reputable brands that will actually tell you when you can no longer write files to it they won't just override previous files that could be very sensitive you don't want to lose those in the long term i've rarely bought the things that i knew were obvious scams just because i mean at the end of the day it is what it is if you're gonna buy a car that you think is worth you know 500 bucks but it shows up and it's only a gt 710 worth maybe 50 bucks i don't know in today's market you know what i mean um there was nothing really surprising there you had to have seen that coming but in this case you could you could easily be fooled i'm willing to say that i i understand why so many people are giving things like this five-star four-star reviews um and that that's of course setting aside the fact that some of these retailers are using reviews for items that do not match these descriptions uh but you know unless you actually run the tests unless you actually notice the drive speed the write and read speed disparities or notice that there is a capacity issue of one that you'll run into very quickly with larger files you could be fooled and that's why i wanted to make this video and buy this drive to show you what you'd run into if you decided to fall for it so hopefully this video cleared up any concerns you might have had regarding these seemingly great deals right i mean that's and that's an insane price per gig if you really think about it especially in this form factory here i mean flash storage what two terabytes for 40 bucks like that's like dreamland alien tech but uh it is what it is it is it's crap uh you should not buy it you shouldn't fall for any of these don't buy anything personally i wouldn't buy anything from any company that i wasn't very familiar with so i would buy from samsung i would buy from sandisk even you know p and y crucial whoever team group even um they all make great stuff i've used all their stuff before i've had issues with a few drives here and there but for the most part um good experiences and you're gonna get right the the capacity that is advertised and you you don't have to run into issues where your files will be overridden once you hit that maximum whatever it is again in this case i think it's somewhere around 20 25 gigs that is nowhere near close to what they advertise and they're getting away with it and the listings that are taken down are replaced by other listings that are backed up by sham reviews for products that aren't linked to the descriptions and and it's it's it's an ongoing feud but hopefully this video and others out there now will clear up those discrepancies keep you from losing 20 30 40 bucks on these garbage usb drives if you like this one give it a thumbs up i'd appreciate that consider leaving a comment down below consider subscribing if you haven't already and i'll catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for being scammed with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 174,699

Keywords: college, tech, pc gaming, computer, how to build a pc, gaming pc, flash drive, usb drive, thumb drive, scam, rip off, ripoff, fake drive, fake, fake flash drive, fake thumb drive test, usb drive scam, usb scam, ripoff thumb drive, fake 1tb, fake 1tb usb flash drive, fake 1tb flash drive, fake 1tb usb, fake 2tb flash drive, fake 2tb usb flash drive, flash drive not showing up

Id: tPHYVJHN6LY

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021