Memory cards are much much cheaper if bought directly from china on ebay. A 32GB SDHC card can be bought for around £20-£30 rather than the typical £80 from a retail outlet in the UK like ebuyer. Even more on the high street if you can find them at all. Problem is, some of them are fakes.

Introduction

You will not be able to spot a fake card before you receive it. You can minimise your chances of getting a fake by buying only branded cards, Sandisk, Kingston, PQI etc. Unfortunately the branded cards sell for quite a bit more than the cheaper non-branded cards for just this reason.

Fortunately you are protected as a buyer if you have bought through Paypal or a credit card. Often the seller doesn’t know if the card is faked or not either so if you provide evidence that it is you’ll usually get a refund. This means that buying an unbranded card is not a thing to completely avoid but definitely you’ll want to fully check out your new card as soon as you receive it.

How do fake cards come into existence?

Imagine a 4gb card being made at the Toshiba factory in china, or where ever Toshiba make their cards. This particular card has a fault and is rejected during the QC procedure. This is often due to having minor faults which lead to reduced usable capacity. From here the card find it’s way out of the factory rather than being destroyed, maybe in the pocket of a worker. The card then has its stickers removed and an alternative 32gb sticker is applied. Finally, the file tables are adjusted to show the card as having a capacity of 32gb so that it shows as such in windows.

So for zero cost to the fraudster, or the cost of buying the failed card from a factory worker, a valuable 32gb card is created to be sold on ebay. It doesn’t matter to them that the card won’t work properly, although many buyers won’t notice until they reach the actual capacity. It could take weeks until you fill the actual 3-4gb with photos from a camera and then it starts corrupting earlier data and writing over old photos etc.

How to protect yourself

Firstly, make sure that you buy on ebay using Paypal. This will offer you the most protection should you need it. Also try to buy from reputable sellers, don’t buy from anyone offering a cheap price with high p&p as you’ll never get the p&p refunded. Finally, test the memory card that you receive immediately so that you can contact the seller for a refund within the required period. This means filling the card to it’s capacity and then reading back the data to check for integrity. You can do this automatically with a software tool called h2testw which can be downloaded from here – SD Card Test Software.

This software tool will write data to your card and read it back. It them gives you a report on whether the card is good or bad and how good or bad it is. You also get a value for the speed of the card, you could use this to check if it really is a ‘class 6′ card etc.

If you suspect that you have a duff card then do the test and copy the data. Send the data to the seller and ask for a refund. Don’t be nasty about it at this point because the seller might not know that the card was duff if he/she bought a batch from someone else to sell on and hasn’t checked the cards fully.

My recent duff 32gb card purchase

Yes, all this info is from recent experience. I bought what I expected to be a 32gb SDHC card from an ebay seller. When I tried to put my ~12gb of mp3 files onto it, they seemed to go on OK but they wouldn’t play back correctly. Some were fine, some were corrupted and some files even played but played the wrong track, often starting mid-track and repeating a short section of music over and over.

I ran the test software and got the following report details.

I sent this and an explanation to the seller. I didn’t ask for a refund or replacement at this point as I wanted to put the ball in the seller’s court. I was really hoping that he’d offer to send me a branded replacement, like the Sandisk Extreme III. He offered a refund and apologised. So I accepted the refund and am about to send the card back.

Of course he claimed not to know about it being fake, but the fact that he sent me a refund before I returned the card (i.e. he believed me) and that he didn’t offer a replacement (i.e. I would find fault with it too) suggests that maybe he was aware. Of course I have no actually proof of this. Either way I got all my money back and learned a bit about SD cards in the process so I’m not too concerned. It was a free p&p purchase too so I didn’t loose any money on the p&p. The picture shown on this article is the duff SDHC card that I recieved.

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