Evolutionary pressure. Tourists now know about the fake USB drive problem, and test-drive hardware in the store. This sort of fakery is much harder to detect,

Evolutionary pressure. Tourists now know about the fake USB drive problem, and test-drive hardware in the store. This sort of fakery is much harder to detect, and unless there are easy tools to detect wrongly-sized USB drives, these are going to be the dominant type of forgeries. Knowing nothing about how USB drive hardware/firmware works, I'm guessing we'll see mainstream Windows software for detecting real drive sizes soon (if not already), and then it'll be a back-and-forth between the two sides. Ultimately (I hope), the costs of the forgeries and the time needed to verify drive size is going to even out, and you can be assured that even though you're buying a knock-off, it'll very likely have a certain amount of space on it and a certain minimum life span.