Fake memory chips

There is an 'outbreak' of fake memory chips. These are mainly sold on eBay and are listed as 1gb, 2gb, 4gb, 8gb, 16gb and 32gb. Even though this problem is years old, thousands of these devices have sold on eBay to unsuspecting customers.

To exacerbate the problem it is very difficult to determine the difference between genuine and fake chips and the sellers get good feed-back because the customer thinks they have what they bought. That is until the chip gets full too quickly, or fails completely.

Most of the fake chips have only a fraction of the stated memory, we have seen them with as little as 64mb on a '1GB' chip, and more recently a 1GB chip on a '4GB' SD card. In the latter case, our customer had photographs from a recent holiday to Egypt, fortunately we were able to recover over 90 percent of the photos.

Many of the fake chips will work perfectly until the required memory usage becomes greater than it's physical size. What happens is that the processor attempts to write to the non-existent memory address and can render the chip dead - it will not be recognised any longer in the camera or computer. When this happens, the only method of recovery is to remove the chip and recover the data manually, using our advanced memory recovery techniques

According to other reports, over 95 percent of memory chips sold on eBay are FAKE. So either buy from a reputable seller, or from a well known retailer.

Some online sources are listed below.

• eBay Report
• User report at Glop
• ZD Net report (If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!)

these reports are just the tip of the iceberg, the problem has been reported throughout UK and the rest of Europe, USA, Australia, New Zealand and Russia.