How I got scammed and how you can avoid it

The worst thing about being scammed in my case is that I deal with scams in my job every day so I should know better, but when they hit me this time, I didn't see it coming.

It was about a month ago, I was looking for USB drives on eBay and I found this seller with about 7,000 feedback selling pretty cheap 32 gig USB drives. After following up his auctions for a couple of days I finally won one of them for 18GBP, about $28 with free shipping from China. It was only after I paid for it that I continued looking at other similar items and I saw another seller with more expensive prices stating "this is more expensive because it's not a fake item, like most others being sold on eBay". Something dawned on me: Is there such thing as fake USB drives?

A simple google search set all my alarms off. I found the central site for victims of fake flash drive scams, SOSFakeFlash, where there is a black list of known fake USB sellers on eBay. Of course my seller, obamastores, was there. I tried to back out from the sale and get a refund but the seller only replied the next day saying that the item was already on the mail. Crap! I waited two weeks until it finally arrived. By then, I already had downloaded h2testw, a tool to check the real size of the drive. Yes, it reports 32 Gb to Windows but that's because the controller has been "fixed". In reality it's a 4gb drive, probably a factory reject if the terrible speed of the drive was any indication.

So I immediately left negative feedback stating that this was a scam. The seller contacted me pretty fast, apparently shocked at the discovery that this was a fake drive. He offered me a refund only if I send the item back to China. Now, there's three things here:

1) This costs money so I wouldn't really get a full refund of my money.
2) He would use it to scam somebody else, and
3) Sending known counterfeit items in the mail is illegal.

So I let him know that the item was not useable and I didn't want to spend money on mailing it back. The scammer then told me he'd refund the money only if I took back my negative feedback. That's their main concern: negative feedback is their bane because eventually eBay will notice if enough people complain. I rejected the offer and opened an eBay complaint, where they told me that I had to send the item back, there was no other way. I refused.

I didn't give up though. I opened a Paypal complaint reporting this as a counterfeit item and the seller as a scammer, which he is. Paypal refunded me the full amount no questions asked but I did point out that the seller was already blacklisted as a scammer. This guy knows what he's selling!!

The beautiful part of the story is that the SOSFakeFlash site has a very good community of people trying to get this particular seller suspended so we are trying to contact other buyers to let them know they've been victims of a scam.

The fact is that most people only insert the drive in the usb port, check that windows reports 32Gb and they're happy with that. When they finally fill up the 4Gb and any further data is lost, then they'll realize it's a fake drive but by then it'll be already too late: the positive feedback has already been left and the 20 days Paypal gives for complaints are up.

I was lucky to get my money back but for the looks of it, many people aren't aware of this scam. When I paid this guy on March 14th he had 7,000+ feedback. Today he's over 10,000. That's a lot of people scammed and a lot of money made. So the lesson to learn here: Not all that glitters is gold: beware of eBay bargains.