There have been complaints about Amazon cards and batteries since they comingled inventory from various suppliers. If someone buys a suspect card anywhere, Amazons, eBay, shady distributors, etc. then resells it here you could have that problem. Cards are rather easy to test however. Run Crystal Diskmark to test write/read performance and then use a tool like H2TestW to verify that the capacity is correct. 15-20 years ago there was a trend to program cards and USB drives to report more capacity than they had.
With the higher prickes of NAND flash the crooks are probably revisiting the older scams and inventing new ones.
I only bought 2 cards used and I knew the person personally. It's really about trust in the seller.
I'd say that, in the past, scam attempts here have likely involved much higher priced items. I did buy some old CF cards here a few years ago with no issue.
As EB-1 mentioned, the dramatic increase in memory prices does raise the risk of card counterfeiting on almost any platform.
When I buy from Amazon, I only use Amazon; not third-party sellers. That helps, but it doesn't eliminate the risk. Even Amazon gets scammed.
Choosing Amazon as the seller wasn’t solid protection when they used the commingled inventory. Apparently they’ve stopped that now but you used to run the risk of getting fake cards and even grey market gear buying from Amazon.
jwpstl wrote:
Choosing Amazon as the seller wasn’t solid protection when they used the commingled inventory. Apparently they’ve stopped that now but you used to run the risk of getting fake cards and even grey market gear buying from Amazon.
No idea AMZN no longer comingles inventory. I had stopped buying from them years ago and only bought from known legit brick and mortars.
I have trouble understanding the scope and effort of all of the various intellectual property theft that goes from copying and mimicry to actually producing "counterfeit" products.
Fstoppers did a video on this recently, which is apparently what this article is based on. I am a fake photographer, so all my fake cards have been working fine for me. YMMV of course.
I don't want to downplay the problem, but I believe that counterfeit memory cards are the least of our worries compared to all the counterfeit safety-critical automotive and aircraft parts out there—not to mention counterfeit medicines.
