With a huge USA military force on Ferdinand Marcos’s largest islands, prepared to defend Taiwan, wouldn’t the massive Philippines’ effort to put Taiwan and the USA out of the microchip business seem contraindicated?
Thousands of Filipinos are either buying or selling fake Kingston Technology devices, clobbering the company and its NAND chip suppliers in Taiwan. Somebody needs to pay attention.
Putting Kingston in California, USA and in Taiwan out of the microchip business is one way of diminishing Taiwan’s worth to the United States and its allies which are preparing for war by occupying the Philippines militarily and building up military assets in South Korea and Japan as well as in Guam.
We can’t let that happen. Kingston Technology has 3,000 employees. 53% Of Kingston Technology employees are women and a significant number of those women are RINJ Women members.
Kingston Technology is likely the largest seller of solid-state devices in the world. It certainly claims to be that. That’s devices, not microchips. For its devices, Kingston Technology is likely the number one buyer of certain microchips in the world, especially controllers, modern-day versions of U.S. invented technology VHSICs for massive data throughputs in a short quantum of time, and NAND flash chips.
Kingston makes some of the most extraordinarily sophisticated and complex devices ever imagined until now in human history. It must be considered to be one of America’s and Taiwan’s national treasures and national pride.
The Attack on Kingston Technology is Sinister as Hell
It’s a two-pronged attack on Taiwan’s chip-makers and device builders. China has been working frantically at building mainland chip foundries and specialized factories to manufacture competitive next-generation devices; and China is also encouraging campaigns to undersell Taiwan’s industries and steal Taiwan’s business flow to any extent possible. It’s a war.
Because China is exploiting thousands of criminal fools willing to commit fraud to pocket some money (not enough $ to be worth the prison time) this tactic for China is likely within the legal bounds of war but the level of damage across the world may be immeasurable if smoothly sold fakes find their way into crucial datacenters like early warning systems, medical, law enforcement and so on. For example, which readers would approve mom or dad in surgery and on life support systems dependent on a counterfeit Chinese data storage SSD?
This could become a crime against humanity. The fake SSDs don’t last long and when they die, so does the data. If it’s a terabyte or two, it matters.
Flooding the world market with massive numbers of cheap, fake, pretend Kingston Technology storage devices is hurting the entire horizon of the microchip world. Only China has the might to pull this off with the help of thousands of credulous sellers and buyers in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia (according to online consumer complaint boards) and all around the world.
Then there is the arm’s-length sneaky business. Not only is China making these fake devices, printing up fake labels and packaging, but it is recruiting criminal sellers online and encouraging their profitability by scamming the world at a time when the world population is extremely vulnerable.
Lazada is owned (83%) by Jack Ma’s Alibaba/AliExpress, which Mr. Ma owns. All three organizations are selling counterfeit devices at merciless low prices and Lazada’s customer base of 300 million across Southeast Asia and in other parts of the world is buying up the Lazada fakes in hordes.
But there is plenty of plausible deniability for Lazada and there is a wall of obstruction that prevents complainers from getting past the demarcation line. And that’s worse than the North/South Korean line. Lazada says it cannot check every device sold. Well, we told them often enough with very specific evidence and they ignored that intensely. There are hundreds of millions of global brand counterfeits, and many are plainly dangerous—even produced in factories without any adherence to hazardous materials rules and now counterfeit devices are centimeters from the users face in computing devices—or what? Maybe implantable medical devices?
This is the story of how astute NGO workers, a global women’s safety organization specialized in helping ladies and their kids in war zones, with small budgets while faced with massively declining spinning-disk computer storage hardware, cautiously tested every aspect of proposed replacement technology and then started digging when they realized that thousands of delightful, but indeed, credulous Filipinos were being bilked. Another aspect is the fake insurance that only protects Lazada if a product is broken or stolen during the shipping process. Lazada has sold credulous Filipinos on the idea of donating a portion of their retail sales total for so-called insurance. We tried that and it was a scam.
Why is Lazada harbouring and protecting Scammers selling counterfeit Kingston NVME SSDs while hoping to put Kingston Technologies (TW) out of business. For consumers, there is no protection. They buy the product at between $80 and $110 (CDN$) and install it. After a few days or weeks when it fails, there is no one to honour the warranty because the product is a counterfeit—everything is fake. Everything.
Despite massive sales due to the prices being very low, and the lie about being a Kingston authorized reseller, the counterfeit product shows mediocre performance and bad longevity.
Above OKc Mall on Lazada claimed to be an authorized seller of Kingston Products when we bought an SSD at Lazada from this seller. The device died 36 hours after we confirmed receipt of the item. It died because it was asked to do what these things are made for: storage. We added 600GB of data to a 1 Terabyte device which is what the product is for. We did that with real Kingston devices by loading, erasing and reloading 60% capacity files ten times and the Genuine Kingston devices didn’t show any signs of stress. The fake became intermittent, occasionally crashed the Dell computer and then died completely.
Kingston’s public statements about authorized sellers do not include the Lazada sellers claiming to be Kingston partners and spokespersons for Kingston indicated there is no relationship whatsoever.
This scam on this product has been in place for around twenty months. Kingston launched its game-changing NV2 on September 7th, 2022. The number of sales of the Lazada counterfeit regime is unknown but for each store selling the fake product on Lazada, the sales in each case are very high.
There seems to be dozens of stores run out of the Philippines, mostly in the Manila area, but in truth, across all of the Philippines islands, all stores using the same catch phrases, the same secrecy policies, many offering the same incentive free screwdriver and selling the same fake Kingston NV2 and A400 products. Sales in each case are in the millions of Pesos according to their brag stories.
When a buyer reports a counterfeit product, the sellers quickly make the complaint disappear. Usually, the process involves the happy recipient of the cheap fake product installing it, and then noticing its performance is not the 3,500 MB/s the real product delivers, or in the worst case, the counterfeit device flames out. That’s a good description. The 1TB variant of the counterfeits run very hot. They are simple 2017 vintage controller chips and two 512 GB SanDisk chips together creating a bizarre total of 931 GB.
The Kingston NV2 was a breakthrough in Fall 2022, 21 months ago.
Kingston’s NV2 has been taking the IT community by storm with its low cost and three year warranty. The cache is sized at 88 GB, and once that is full, writes complete at 600 MB/s. Copying data out of the SLC cache (folding) completes at 100 MB/s. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is truly excellent and exceeds Kingston’s promises by wide margins.
Click images to enlarge. They contain a lot of useful data not mentioned in the article.
The RINJ Foundation, while replacing datacenter drives in Southeast Asia, sequentially bought two NV2s from two seperate sellers on Lazada at reasonable prices.
The technician reported, “After I installed the NV2 on a test and development machine it worked for 36 hours after I loaded 600gigs of test data. The device went intermittent and then failed. I had already marked it as received at Lazada. It’s now dead. I sent it to Kingston to try get an RMA and they said it is not ours and sent it back. I sent pics to a different Kingston Lab and they said the same thing. Fake. “
Above Tests and reports submitted by third party Devices MD.
Just two of many fake serial numbers according to Kingston people speaking on condition of anonymity.
- Mar-13-2024-B-Shark Mall-LAZADA-PH ser. number: 50026B7784EA3474.
- Mar-26-2024 OKc Mall LAZADA-PH ser. number-50026B7784EA3476.
There are several Lazada stores either coached or completely run by the same Chinese crime organization selling various counterfeits, targeting mostly Kingston Technologies (Taiwan). Some of these people we noticed are part of the illegal gambling rings in Southeast Asia when we shared information about suspects with colleagues in Manila. Small timer Filipinos need to get out of this crime ring—and watch their backs.
A dead giveaway here was using a fake hologram (above). Kingston and Dell software indicated serious issues with this device. Kingston labs in Taiwan said it is not theirs. RINJ Foundation image.
RINJ Foundation image.
The real deal is an awesome product, performance-relative-to-cost, and in any case, where one doesn’t need a screaming 10 GB/s. This baby tops out around 3500 but it did that or close to that on Dell PCIE3 technology, way ahead of Kingston’s modest claims for the product, which is aimed at the next level up, PCI Express, Generation-4 where it again exceeds advertised performance.
Photo courtesy Kingston Technology. Photo is cropped for publication. Art, cropping, enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective-Magazine
The genuine Kingston NV2 is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 3,500 MB/s and 2,100 MB/s write according to tests done by TechPowerup.
The genuine Kingston Technology NV2, 1 /2TB NVME SSDs are barn burner product in performance-relative-to-cost.
The NV2, which launched in September 2022, followed the NV1, is not able to compete with Kingston Technology’s upper level NVME M.2 socket SSDs, some of which operate at breathtaking speeds, or faster.
Regardless, the NV2 is a breakthrough for the industry because it shows that mainline manufacturers like Kingston with excellent product reputations, are able to cater to the (s)lower end market which would include a gazillion product replacements for spinning-disk HDD backup drives in the coming years.
The fading spinning-disk hard drives used as backups are needing replacement as many approach ten years of age. Kingston’s NV2 is a candidate.
In short, the Genuine Kingston NV2 is a blessing for the storage folks in enterprise operations doing regular backups on file servers and watching as the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) numbers of the old spinning disks grow closer.
Karina Angeles of The RINJ Foundation explains that global RINJ Women policy is that patient and personnel data may not be stored on site and may not be stored on the cloud. The data must be backed up on reliable media in an encrypted state end-to-end and stored in iron safes or safety deposit boxes off site.
Data storage is crucial to human development and global values. We need companies.
For those data-storage techs out there, who bought a fake NV2 with its fancy packaging and labels, they risk losing much of the world’s important data, ‘too sensitive to be stored on the cloud’. That’s not to say that the risk includes a compromise of data—there is no excuse for that—but losing massive amounts of data storage can destroy businesses and institutions. We won’t know which ones until it happens.
“The backbone of any business is data, and when data is lost, it affects the functionality of an enterprise. Damaged reputation—firms that had data breaches usually suffer damaged reputations. Financial implications.—any data breach has financial implications.” Citing Data Loss: Hazards, Risks and Strategies for Prevention
Above Counterfeit 1-Terabyte NVME M.2 connector, form factor 2280. Store selling this item on Lazada is Lazada’s OKc Mall. Order 809835277690962 Placed on 26 March 2024 18:29:15 for Karinna Angeles, nurse at the RINJ Foundation Nurses training center.
Photo Art, cropping, enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective-Magazine
So why Is Lazada supporting even encouraging alleged counterfeit criminals in China (the fakes seem to be made in China factories) flooding the markets with hopelessly poor imitations of Kingston’s NV2 product?
It’s somewhat late to stop this process it seems—the fakes are all over the world and the Alibaba/AliExpress/Lazada regime has built a monstrous scam complete with trained monkeys who will never give away a seller’s address for a product return which would actually fetch police as well as the product return. But the players’ organizers are well trained by CCP cloak and dagger experts who to a large extent control Lazada/Alibaba today for state purposes. Mostly Lazada is a good service, but its machinery is occasionally exploited for nationalistic purposes. Everything is in China.
Jack Ma may own 83% of Lazada and control most of Alibaba, but Xi Jinping’s CCP brainiacs’ infiltrate and control the mega-retail organization. The CCP at one time felt it necessary to knock Jack Ma down in size because he with a cult-like following had become too popular and more importantly, way too powerful in a nation that has only one God, Xi Jinping. This separation all happened as Xi Jinping also began to sing the praise of reunification with Taiwan.
Nevertheless, Jack Ma is a goodwill ambassador for China and is devoutly loyal to his country, if not its current government. He likely doesn’t realize that thousands of computer enthusiasts and serious systems managers have bought fake SSDs from fake companies on his platforms that span the world with crooks holding out to be authorized resellers of Kingston Technologies. They sell fakes.
And this is just one corporate case. There are other manufacturers suffering counterfeits that steal their sales with products that don’t last but create a barrage of warranty claims that could never be handled.
It’s actually a sad story. The people we talked to in Taiwan and in the USA within this microchip sector are some of the finest straight edges anywhere. They have no comprehension of how malignant the problem of criminality in the cyber world can be. Information tech people always seem to be nice people. What they are up against is awful.
Another sad fact: An advanced tech company in southern China, a brilliant startup at the onset of the Pandemic (Nobody could have known except the Americans who did the gain-of-function research in Wuhan.) run by some 60 remarkable young technology workers were put out of business because they could not make their SSD product cheaply enough to compete with the dressed-up fakes. This monstrous counterfeiting scheme may be blowing up in Beijing’s face, doing as much harm to China as anyone. It’s really disgusting that so many people like this really suck at life.
Note: The author served as the President of the Toronto Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) for eight years and is currently a life member of AFCEA in the United States.
Additional Tech Contact for this article is [email protected]