I have found that purchasing SanDisk USB thumb drives and SD cards from Amazon is like playing Russian Roulette. It’s not until you plug them in that you realize you have been scammed. Now I only buys these items from Micro Center.
The scam for many flash drives is to provide a working one that's only a fraction of the size (but it reports the full size).
It works fine as long as you don't use more than the real capacity, that may be a just few percents or as much as half.
Either way, it doesn't matter if they're sold by Amazon since they intermix inventory in their warehouses anyways. Might as well buy the same, cheaper item from the sketchy seller, because it's getting fulfilled out of the same bin anyways.
Each was also somehow doctored to report back as showing up as 32GB in windows explorer but would freeze once you tried transferring more than 2GB onto it.
Nowadays I rarely buy from eBay unless it is niche/unique/local.
Never buy from Scamazon any more. Used to love them now it's just a gamble hoping you get exactly what you paid for
I mentioned the mixing of inventories, but as I've said, I've purchased literally tens of thousands of dollars worth of items from Amazon. I average about 1.5 orders per week over the past decade, and I've never received an item that I doubted the legitimacy of. Furthermore, after some research it seems that Amazon does not mix their own inventory with third-party sellers inventory; they only mix third-party seller inventory when the seller opts into having their inventory mixed.
Would you mind sharing the source of this information? If this is true it I think it would be a relatively recent change as this particular issue has been at the center of several high-profile consumer products liability lawsuits in the last few years.
I did read the FAQ that Amazon provides to sellers[1], but it doesn't definitely say whether Amazon Retail items can be fulfilled by FBA merchants. (Interestingly, it does say that consumable products like cosmetics aren't eligible for virtual tracking, and a lot of the online reports from people are those types of products.)
[1] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G200141480
A clear indicator that it's directly from Amazon and not intermingled is "Ships from and sold by Amazon". Any mention of fulfillment in that text should make you slightly more cautious.
Obviously, this entire situation is stupid and they shouldn't force you to parse their little blurbs about selling/fulfillment, but the information is there.