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."