{"id":1049,"date":"2014-03-31T17:28:32","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T16:28:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/?p=1049"},"modified":"2014-04-01T12:18:48","modified_gmt":"2014-04-01T11:18:48","slug":"tip-the-blue-bottle-flies-of-mobile-computing-or-the-billion-dollar-business-with-faked-sd-cards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/?p=1049","title":{"rendered":"Tip: The Blue Bottle Flies of mobile computing or the billion Dollar business with faked SD-Cards"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"f1b57b4156f3c43e8a7d72dffc4b2e52\" data-index=\"1\" style=\"float: none; margin:10px 0 10px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\r\ngoogle_ad_client = \"ca-pub-5449811010861855\";\r\n\/* blog.cloud-client.info 2 *\/\r\ngoogle_ad_slot = \"6689524735\";\r\ngoogle_ad_width = 468;\r\ngoogle_ad_height = 60;\r\n\/\/-->\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\r\nsrc=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n<p>Hi Folks,<\/p>\n<p>this article is not a typical one and this is a topic i have in mind a couple of weeks now. Everyone is talking about mobile devices and you would a agree that Smart Phones or Tablet Computer are one of the main drivers in the IT at this time.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of vendors are selling there products and accesories to use it with these mobile devices and if you look on the sales amount of 2013 (Source: Gartner) we have 195.000.000 Tablet devices and if you add smart phones (~500.000.000 devices) we have the amount of nearly 700.000.000 devices. Digital Cameras, MP3 Players or other devices using SD-Cards are not counted here&#8230; What do a lot of these device need to extend the memory? Yes, a SD-Card!<\/p>\n<p>Of course a lot of these devices do also not support a SD-Card (like Apple devices) but still it should be around 350.000.000 devices. So if you look at these figures SD-Card vendors are really the big winners of mobile computing&#8230; &#8230;and if they produce cheap faked SD-Cards there are even more big winners.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1048\" style=\"width: 275px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/sd_fake.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1048\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1048\" alt=\"Faked Micro SD-Card sample\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/sd_fake-265x300.jpg\" width=\"265\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/sd_fake-265x300.jpg 265w, https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/sd_fake-904x1024.jpg 904w, https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/sd_fake.jpg 1000w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 265px) 100vw, 265px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1048\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">One sample for a typical SD-Card fake, all samples i got of these product were fakes..<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I ordered a couple of samples from EBay, Amazon and other sources of the SD-Card type above&#8230; They all are cheap fakes not even worth the packaging fee&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>But how does this trick work&#8230; It&#8217;s quite simple, the smart card itself is a working SD-Card of a size of 2GB or maybe 4GB (or even smaller\/bigger). The SD-Card needs to know how much memory is available with the device and here starts the fake.. The 2GB SD-Card tells everyone to be a 32 or 64GB SD-Card. Simple hardware manipulation but a big win for the vendor. The profit is increddible and these SD-Cards are also sold very cheap (US less than 20 US$, Europe less than 20 \u20ac and similar) and the best for the cheaters.. It&#8217;s hard to detect a faked SD-Card, most customers will note it after weeks or months and then they often believe the cheap card is &#8220;broken&#8221;. Systems like Paypal or payment thru Credit Card do not work regarding the time until the user note this &#8220;issue&#8221;. Why?<\/p>\n<p>The user will not note this &#8220;difference&#8221; until the real available space is fully used and the computer\/tablet\/smart phone start to access &#8220;not existing&#8221; areas. For example in Windows you will get a &#8220;semaphore error&#8221; message if this &#8220;not existing&#8221; memory starts to be filled up with data, also you can not format the SD-Card with a file system like NTFS and only fast format (like Smart Phones or Cameras mostly do) do work without any error message.<\/p>\n<p>There are a lot of cheaters outside but not all of these resellers know that they do offer a faked product. During my tests only one EBay reseller from Poland did not take the card back or better, he is not active on EBay anymore. So these re-sellers are mostly victims too, have this in mind if you got a faked card(!). I informed some german resellers and mostly they have stopped the auctions just in time and until they verified that the offered product was a fake.<\/p>\n<p>How can you prevent to be a victim, 10 golden rules:<\/p>\n<p>1) Only buy from a &#8220;thrusted&#8221; reseller being active for years and not only for a few weeks.<br \/>\n2) Buy in a store if possible, than you know were to go.<br \/>\n3) There are no &#8220;64GB&#8221; SD<strong>H<\/strong>C Cards by standard (<a title=\"Official SD-Card Standards\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sdcard.org\/developers\/overview\/capacity\/\">Official SD-Card Standards<\/a>) and any Card offered as 64GB SD<strong>H<\/strong>C Card is a FAKE in general. (Yes.. There are a lot of stupid cheaters around, see pictures below, all from current EBay or Amazon offers!).<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/sdfake2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1050 aligncenter\" alt=\"sdfake2\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/sdfake2.jpg\" width=\"224\" height=\"165\" \/><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/sdfake3.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1051 aligncenter\" alt=\"sdfake3\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/sdfake3.jpg\" width=\"225\" height=\"165\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>4) A Card labeled with a brand doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s not a fake and this incl. if they are labeled as SD<strong>X<\/strong>C card.<br \/>\n5) You will &#8220;NOT&#8221; get any 64GB SD-Card for 12$ or something around this&#8230; In my tests all 64GB Cards sold for less than 35$ or 30\u20ac were fakes, quite easy.. If a reseller tells something different please send me \u00a01000 samples were I can choose one random card of my choice for tests and point to your current online offer. If you offer real 64GB SD-Cards for less these prices in Europe or the US i will provide you free ads on my site! Promised!<br \/>\n6) Until you got the card test it just in time with nonsense data and copy a bunch of data on it (like movies) also verify that the data is not corrupt. Movies are a good sample because you can verify the result very fast. This will take time to fill up the card but this is the safe and best way to test it.<br \/>\n7) Use a wipe tool to &#8220;zero out&#8221; the full SD-Card.<br \/>\n8) Check the write speed, SDXC cards are much faster than SD or SDHC and the write speed for a SDXC Card in Windows Explorer should be higher than 10MB\/s in general, use also &#8220;large&#8221; files for the tests because small files are written much slower to SD-Cards in general.<br \/>\n9) Don&#8217;t buy SD-Cards in online auctions, at a farmers market, a basar or somewhere similar&#8230; Iam sorry, but here the risk to get a fake is increddible high.<br \/>\n10) Always pay with credit card or paypal, after you got the SD-Card proceed with a test and block the payment if you got a fake ASAP.<br \/>\nIf you follow these rules you should be much saver but still: It&#8217;s a billion dollar business to earn &#8220;easy&#8221; cash in a much safer way for criminals and you can never be save that you will not get a cheap fake.<\/p>\n<p>Cheers<br \/>\nMichael<\/p>\n<p>P.S.: Don&#8217;t blame main vendors like SanDisk, Sony, Transcend or other for &#8220;cheap&#8221; products getting damaged after a few days or weeks and don&#8217;t believe if a reseller tells you the device is not compatible for &#8220;large&#8221; SD-Cards, contact the vendor to check if the card is a original one and\/or try an other card. Believe me.. Very often you got a fake and not a &#8220;technical&#8221; problem with your device or a broken card. Also you can contact the police but this could be a &#8220;hard&#8221; way to demonstrate this to the officers because cheating with SD-Cards is much more saver than cheating with a high expensive faked watch or a money bill and these guys know that. Do also not believe we&#8217;re only talking about one or two percent, if i look at EBay auctions or Amazon offers i would expect between 10% and 30% (or even more) offered online SD-Cards are not what they should be and this a \u00a0lot.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi Folks, this article is not a typical one and this is a topic i have in mind a couple of weeks now. Everyone is talking about mobile devices and you would a agree that Smart Phones or Tablet Computer are one of the main drivers in the IT at this time. A lot of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1423,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-vendors"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3AZQ3-gV","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1423"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1049"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1069,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions\/1069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cloud-client.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}