Axel Steimel gets angry when he talks about a thief all but stealing someone's memories, one snapshot at a time, through counterfeit flash-memory cards sold on eBay.
Memory cards, used in cameras and other digital devices, record life's most treasured moments, from a baby's first steps to the vacation of a lifetime.
And yet counterfeit and poorly made cards fail, sometimes at the worst possible time, resulting in the loss of photos and other important data.
"I have read plea after plea from people who want to recover their pictures, but it's impossible to recover what isn't there," Steimel said about the worst card failures.
"It's like stealing memories," he added.
Defects or shortcomings in the cards include less-than-stated memory capacity and slow data transfer speeds. Card quality can vary widely from one seller to the next, and it's not easy to detect.
Steimel, of Milwaukee, a retired Milwaukee County bus driver who now designs electronics systems, says he has bought dozens of flash-memory cards from eBay over a seven-year period to test whether they're authentic or knockoffs of major brands including SanDisk, Kingston and Transcend.
Usually, he said, they're inferior knockoffs.
The cards may look identical to legitimate brands, and they could work well for months without failure. When you put them in a camera or computer, it also could appear they have the advertised capacity — such as 32 gigabytes — when in fact the real capacity is much less.
Often, Steimel said, the shortcomings don't show up until it's too late — when dozens of photos or other important data is overwritten on the card and is gone forever.
Upset with eBay
Steimel says he's tracked dozens of sellers on eBay selling thousands of the knockoff cards. Sometimes eBay suspends their accounts, but they can resurface under another name or a slightly different scam.
"I am not so upset with the individual seller as I am with eBay," Steimel said.
For its part, eBay says it shuts down sellers of counterfeit goods when it finds them, and that fraudulent activity on the site has come down 50% over the past seven years.
The website also has a money-back guarantee that helps protect buyers in cases where an item is not received or is not as described, as long as you contact your seller within 30 days of the estimated delivery date.
"We are at an all-time low as far as bad activity goes," eBay spokesman Randy Moore said.
But the site has 105 million users worldwide, making it impossible to police everything that's sold.
"We do a lot of things, but unfortunately there are instances where people continue to abuse the system," Moore said.
Even positive customer feedback for a seller is no guarantee a product isn't a knockoff.
By the time someone discovers the flash memory they purchased was a cheap copy of a legitimate brand, they've already left a glowing review for the seller, Steimel said.
The way to tell whether a card has the advertised memory capacity is to run a test utility available online, Steimel said.
Counterfeit goods, from digital products to bulletproof vests, are a trillion-dollar business, according to the website The Counterfeit Report.
Many fakes exist
"Someone will take a very cheap memory card, that's maybe a gigabyte, and rebrand it to eight gigabytes or more....They're just changing the label and reprogramming the card to make it look real," said Craig Cosby, the website's publisher.
Poor-quality cards, the castoffs from major manufacturers, are sold in huge quantities under many names, said Joe Gazzana with Great Lakes Media Technology Inc., a Mequon firm that sells digital media.
The quality "is not something you can determine from eBay," Gazzana said.
The safest bet is to stick with retailers authorized by memory-card manufacturers, such as SanDisk, said Sandy Chalmers, trade and consumer protection administrator at the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.
