Fake Kingston 32 GB Pen Drive

Recently a salesperson turned up at our office proposing to sell Kingston 32 GB pen drives for a very cheap price (Rs.1200 each). He claimed that he had stolen some of them from the port when the shipment arrived. We were not interested and so did not purchase any of them.

As soon as he left, we did a google for the actual price of Kingston 32 GB pen drive. What we came across was a large number of articles mentioning about fake 32 GB Kingston pen drives.

These fake pen drives are actually 512 MB - 2 GB. The packing is exactly like that of Kingston. And when you copy a huge file to the drive, it shows as if the file got copied successfully. Therefore people got fooled easily. The best way I can think of to check whether the pen drive is genuine or not is to copy a huge file to it and compare the md5sums of both the original and the copied file. If they are the same, the copy was successful.

I again went down and looked for the person but he had already left. I think we have to be very careful when purchasing products which come for an extremely low rate.

Another interesting thing which reflects here is the human psychology. Below is an article reg. these fake 32 GB pen drives where almost all the employees of the company ended up purchasing it. It would be interesting to see how many of these employees would be willing to steal these pen drives (given that they would not be caught) from the shipment directly. I am sure many of them wouldn't be willing to do such a thing. But yet they might not even had given a second thought when purchasing them even when they were told that they were stolen :).

References:
http://www.consumercomplaints.in/complaints/kingston-32-gb-pen-drive-c12... (Interesting read)
http://www.thefake32gbs.blogspot.com/ (This site mentions some fix for using these drives to their actual capacity which would probably be somewhere between 512 MB - 2 GB).