Buying electronic goods is tricky nowadays. How do you know that what you’re buying is real and not a fake? They all look so similiar and in many cases almost the same.

Often you buy something and you won’t even notice that it’s not a real thing because it looks so genuine.

Here’s an example. Recently I was upgrading a usb memory stick to higher capacity as I do more video training and my training files are getting bigger and bigger. So I wanted to buy a new memory stick with higher capacity and faster as well.

One of the fastest and well build memory sticks on the market seems to be the Samsung Bar Plus:

It’s a USB 3.1 drive and it offers some amazing speeds. Here’s from Samsung website:

Fast and convenient read speeds up to 300 MB/s¹ with the latest USB 3.1 standard

For the capacity I was looking for (64GB), it’s actually up to 200 MB/s (300 MB/s is the speed of 128GB and 256GB drives) but still super fast.

So I got one of these from one of high street retailers. When I got it I ran some tests on it as I usually do just to see how fast it is. I was up for a surprise…

Note: I use CrystalDiskMark for testing.

The usb drive gave me some interesting results… It was reading at 15 MB/s. Yes, it’s not a mistake, just 15 MB/s. And writing at only 4 MB/s:

Obviously, this was a fake. Although a very good one, it looked so genuine and was supplied in packaging which looked genuine, too. Even for a person like myself, and I’ve been a technology geek for quite a few years.

Just look at the image below:

So be very careful where you buy your technology from. There are many people trying to make quick money selling fakes. And this applies to everything.