Fake USB Flash Drives

Hi folks,

For the last couple of years, there seems to have been a huge influx of so-called 'fake' USB flash drives. Why they are called fake, is

•  they report a storage size larger than they can actually store
• maybe they use compression internally
• maybe they just allow data to be overwritten without warning
• they often cannot be used as a bootable USB device

I am one of the unlucky many who did purchase one of these devices, and found out something was strange with it when it would not boot an Ubuntu or Gentoo Linux LiveUSB installer.

Although I purchased my 4GB USB storage device a long time ago, I always keep electronic records of my purchases. This unit was purchased on Amazon.de, from a 3rd party reseller called MemoryWorld.de . I highly suggest that Amazon should blacklist this vendor for selling fake or counterfeit USB flash storage devices.

My particular device has USB vendor ID (VID) 2008 and USB product ID (PID) 2018. I'm not really sure where you would look for this in Windows, however, in Linux (using lsusb) this device will show up as 2008:2018 .

I'll post some detailed photos of the device later, but I just opened the casing and the USB transceiver is an UHC2008. The company that makes this is called "Shenzhen Sea Song Microelectronics Co., Ltd". The label on the storage chip is SFO8BGTP. I'm not quite sure who this belongs to yet though.

Just in case anyone has the same device, there are some instructions for how to fix and verify the device here. Unfortunately, the instructions assume that you are a Windows user. Hopefully I'll be able to find out if there is an equivalent tool for Linux.