The continued popularity of USB memory sticks and flash drives for promotional and marketing activities has spawned a parallel market in the supply of cheap and often fake products.

Understandably procurement managers and buyers are constantly looking at ways to drive down their costs and it’s tempting when you’re offered memory sticks at a significant discount to order them. After all the pictures of the memory sticks you’ll be shown to support the order will look pretty much the same as other quotes you’ll no doubt have obtained from other suppliers so how do you know if what you’re being offered is genuine?

Firstly, lets be clear on what some of the typical scams are:

• Use of “re-cycled” and Grade B flash memory chips. These are flash memory chips that have been salvaged from other products or perhaps failed a full QA process. They are likely to be to correct memory size but they will have a much higher failure rate and will typically perform poorly, e.g. the read/write speeds will be slow.
• “Masking” smaller capacity flash chips to make them look bigger. This is where the external flash disk and packaging is marked up to look like it’s a 1GB stick, the memory stick when connected to a PC will also suggest it has 1GB of storage but the actual capacity is say 256MB or 512MB. Extremely difficult to spot.
• Using cheaper memory components rather than the specified brands. If you want a memory stick with a specified high-grade chip such as Intel or Samsung then you’ll pay a premium for these but you’ll also trust your supplier that these used. Once your memory sticks are delivered you don’t want to have to go through the hassle of breaking open a sample just to check that the internal memory is as specified.
• Simple repackaging and re-labelling the memory sticks to make them look like they have more memory than they actually do.

The best way to avoid becoming a victim of these scams is to buy from a trusted and reputable supplier and ideally a local supplier that will take ownership of any post delivery problems or issues you might have.

Whilst it’s incredibly tempting to buy direct from some of the “factories” advertising themselves on the Internet think long and hard about it before you commit to an order. How for example will you deal with any problems once you have taken delivery of them? Typically once a “factory” has shipped they will not take the product back and your chances of recovering your money and taking action against them are slim to non-existent!

Also many of the supposed “factories” offering discounted prices are not really factories or manufacturers at all. Whilst they may have fancy web sites with lots of images of production staff diligently sitting at desks manufacturing and assembling memory sticks these are typically just “stock photos” and the factories will either be agents, middlemen or fraudsters.

The only way to be truly sure is to visit your supplier on site, check their factories and working conditions, check that they are complying with the current RoHS regulations and that they meet all the latest WEEE and REACH Compliance Regulations. Failing this just go with a local supplier that has already undertaken all of this due diligence.