The company says that in its business, it’s finding more and more devices with cut-down memory chips with manufacturer names removed

Removing the identification from the top of ICs isn’t that uncommon

Clearly discarded and unrecognizable microSD cards are also soldered onto a USB stick and managed with the external one on the USB stick board instead of the microSD’s internal controller

This makes sense, the memory controller on uSD card doesn’t normally do wear levelling and stuff that a larger flash drive does.

These chips are not completely broken, but CBL notes they come with reduced storage capacity, implying that reducing capacity was how they were salvaged.

Isn’t disabling bad blocks of memory chips and selling them at the lower capacity pretty common?