Thats not a counterfiet good. It's fraud, it's claiming something is more than it is, but it isnt counterfeit unless they are abusing trademarks. Which marks were at issue? You might consider contacting them as they are as much a victim as you.

You're correct, initially it was merely fraud, but counterfeit dimensions soon emerged.

I should also mention that when I received the package, the USB drive was inside of Kingston USB drive packaging, which surprised me because they didn't describe it as a Kingston product on the listing page.

I can suppose the rationale for Kingston packaging was that Kingston was the only provider of 512GBs at the time, and its addition was a way to sell the fraud's narrative should any doubt later arise, such as after getting mysteriously corrupted data whenever more than 32GB was used.

I had live chats about the case with different customer service agents over a period of months. However, every time I spoke about the issue, it was like the previous hour-long conversations had never happened. Each time, I had to get the agent up to speed on the situation from the ground up, resending the images of evidence, re-explaining that I would be happy to return the item but only to the police or to Taobao corporate instead of resupplying and becoming the accomplice of a suspected criminal.

As far as I could tell, there was no internal procedure for investigating the possibility of fraud or counterfeit. The customer service agents only ever viewed the case through a general return heuristic. The first and final recommendation was always to "return the product to the seller."

THAT's counterfiet. Im betting that the use whatevet cases they can get cheap out the back door of a factory.

It's sad that trademarks are considered a bigger issue than rampant fraud.

Corporations are people, my friend. As for what the rest of us are, the jury's still out on that one.

It's recommended to use an agent to verify your goods before leaving China for this reason.

Alibaba has vested interest in removing fake vendors from their platforms. They have a few automated ways to find fake vendors but a large part of the process depends on community help (i.e. users, brand-name companies, etc.)

Taobao is much more lenient than the international facing Aliexpress. However, reporting bad vendors does work & I do believe they incur hefty fees if they wish to return.

One thing I've noticed is that banned & counterfeit sellers often move on to WeChat for sales.

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