Fake Sandisk CF cards

Unfortunately most of you will read this page after buying counterfeited CF cards, but hopefully my story will help you find the truth about what you bought. And maybe even prevent you from clicking the wrong "buy now!" button. The first thing to realize is that no one is safe. Obviously buying from Ebay is not the brightest idea, but major (online) stores are also selling fake Sandisk cards; don't think it only happen to others. Anyway, here's what happened to me.

I bought four 16GB, 60MB/s Sandisk CF cards from Amazon Japan in November 2012. The order was "fulfilled by Amazon", which means that the goods are stored and shipped from an Amazon warehouse. However, the shop actually owning the cards was not Amazon. I thought that was an extra guarantee compared to the standard "marketplace" stores found on Amazon, and as you can imagine I was wrong. Anyway, the order arrived on time, I picked it up at the local convenience store and started playing with the cards. They seemed a bit slow, so I benchmarked them by dumping 2GB chunks of data using the unix command "dd" (*). Alarm bells started to ring when the new 60MB/s cards turned out to be slower than my older Extreme IV 45MB/s card. WTF?

By that time I had also noticed two subtle differences between the 4 cards, even though all boxes were the same:

• one had a completely different serial number. It showed space for 308 shots when formatted in my camera, while the others showed 301 shots. So it was not only cosmetically but also physically different.
• the labels were of slightly varying quality.

Originally I though that meant different batches, which is rather good (**). But it was a bit more than that... The shit really hit the fan when I tried to benchmark the "odd serial number" card: no data could be written on it from the desktop, although the camera was happy to put pictures on it. Ooops. Typing the "odd" CF card serial in Google led me to a page explaining exactly the problem that I had: this serial number is from a Kensington part! Now I was clearly in couterfeited items territory, so I promptly followed Amazon's procedures to return the items. More on that later.

So here we are finally: how can you spot a fake Sandisk CompactFlash card? Obviously there are no rules, only a few hint. Actually quite a few hints if you pay attention to details...

Package

The real and fake boxes are quite different, but this is probably due to Sandisk renewing their design. Luckily, the devil's in the details:

Counterfeited

Real

• The CF card shown on top of the camera image (box front) looks crudely photoshopped. This is the case for both fake and real packages! Also, both packages show the proper rounded metal corners for the card (see below)
• The "CompactFlash" on the CF card picture does not have the trademark sign (r) on the fake box.

  Counterfeited

  Real

• The camera picture used as background for the card is of a lower quality on the fake box (good luck to spot that if you don't have real and fake boxes at hand!)
• Stickers used to seal the fake box were round. The real one has rectangular stickers (with little rounded corners)

These details may not be significant; it is still possible that the "fake" box is actually a real one. The content, however, differs significantly.

Inner plastic blister

The card is held in place in its larger cardboard box with a plastic blister (vacuum-formed if I have to guess).

• The real blister has recycling marks and some numbers on it. The fake one has nothing.

  Real

• The top and bottom halves of the real blister are thermically sealed so that you must break the blister to get the card. The two halves may separate easily in some cases, but they will be bound together. The fake blister has no seal between top and bottom halves.

  Real

Card case

I found the little plastic card case more difficult to open for the fake item. The real Sandisk CF card case opens and closes better. Sorry, no pics here.

The card itself

Many differences here:

Counterfeited	Real
Counterfeited	Real

• Serial number: should always be in the lower half of the edge, on the right (older cards may have it on two lines, on the side edge). Sandisk numbers look like this: BL120713933B. First four digits are manufacturing year/month (12-07). Anything significantly different means a fake, but a proper S/N does not guarantee a real card. The "Adolf" card I got is actually a Kensington S/N (I know it's not "Adolf" in the serial number, but I like to read it this way ;-)

  Counterfeited

  Real

• Labels should be properly oriented: the top of the label is always on the connector side. No problems with my fakes here, but these mistakes happen with fakes.
• The labels should fit closely within the edges of the metallic shield.

  Counterfeited

  Real

• "60MB/s" needs a small asterisk. Chinese don't care about lawyers, Americans do ;-) (actually, older versions of legit cards don't have the asterisk)

  Counterfeited

  Real

• (I guess) newer CF cards have a video logo on them with the number of minutes of HD recording. Older ones may not. But since you don't want to buy something made two years ago I suggest you check for the video mark. Same thing for box design etc: stick to newest versions that have less chance of being already copied.
• Back label: the Sandisk logo should be nice and crisp, without thin lines (its design is slightly thick/blocky). It should also have an (r) mark. Look also for the newer CF card logo and its (tm) mark.

  Counterfeited

  Real

• At this point we've not discussed the hardware itself. There seem to be only one way to identify it: the metallic shield has round edges on all eight corners (4 front, 4 back) and should have a brushed finish. Yes, the finish of the shield of your CF card is important! :D

  Counterfeited

  Real

Epilogue

Would I buy CF cards again with Amazon? Probably not. But to be fair, Amazon reimbursed me quickly and smoothly, even if their support droids mostly sent automated messages, and never actually took any specific action regarding the fact they had stocked a counterfeited item in their warehouse.

A few days later I got four real Sandisk CF cards from a small electronics shop lost in the shady parts of Akihabara. LOL.

Links

Some links to other discussions about this problem on the interweb:

• Have I bought a fake Sandisk card??: Many issues similar to mine, but this fake had an asterisk next to the "60MB/s"
• Ebay FAQ: why am I writing this page again? Everything is already there...
• dpreview: a real card of a slightly different design. YMMV
• Some fake cards, a bit old.
• Sandisk website, useless...
• Backlink to a discussion on Petapixel.com

(*)2GB and not 16GB because FAT is limited to 4GB. Yeah, I knew that too, but it took me some time to figure it out: I thought the cards were broken! Turned out they were foobar'ed indeed, but for other reasons.

(**) It is considered good practice to mix HDDs of different batches when building a RAID array. You know, so that they don't break all at the same time...