Even despite the Universe not taking sides, “Too good to be true” does exist.
If you do your research, you will find the typical price such devices go for. Think about it — why would anyone want to sell something at less than 20% of its market value?
The obvious answer is — because they want to rip you off. And sometimes, the obvious answer is the right one. The reality is — those devices are quite probably simply not worth even their going price.
Here’s how some of them look inside:
- fake network adapter (this wouldn’t even work) — some fake pendrives are built in a similar way
- fake external HDD (this one would work but would have much less storage space available than is advertised)
NOTE: such a fake “HDD” would probably have its programming modified to:
report more capacity than it has (so your PC would say that it has the space it claims to have on the box), and rewrite data from the start of the actual space (ie. overwriting what you stored there previously) during a write operation bigger than what it can actually store — leading to data loss (this is done so that you don’t get suspicious when suddenly the write operations complete instantly).
The device will format just fine, it will read data (up to as much storage as it has) just fine, and it will accept and seemingly write data just fine… until you find that your data can’t be read back.
This ensures that you find out about the scam much too late (when you’ve already written some data to the device).
In fact, you don’t even need to modify an existing pendrive — you can as easily mass-produce your own*, giving them just enough space to contain the filesystem and a small number of files (even as little as 32MiB would do for any filesystem, I think).
By the time you realize that the first files you put on there are becoming unreadable, the scammer’s long gone.
- … and if you live somewhere where semiconductor companies deliver samples to, you can even get a number of controller and memory chips for free — as long as you don’t mind making your own circuit boards.