It should be noted that spot market prices for the types of NAND Flash used in these players have risen past $16 for 1MB (8Mbit) chips and $31 for 2MB (16Mbit). That's more than double what the prices were at their lowest this spring.
Obviously, the bigger manufacturers have more stable contracts (and probably better prices than this), but it should serve as a good pointer as to what a reasonable price is for these things. Add a couple of $ each for: the screen, chipset, battery, PCB + auxiliary electronics, casing and assembly, etc., and you see how $17-22 (+ dealer profit & shipping) for a 1GB player manufactured May/June is a reasonable floor for as cheap as a Chipod is ever going to get (until Flash prices go down again and capacities increase that is).
When something sounds too cheap to be true, it usually is.
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Edit: I'm sorry to hear that you got cheated. To take stab at a positive spin on something negative, they probably support Ogg Vorbis (the aoTuV version sound pretty darn good down to 80kb/s), thus you could still be able to get a reasonable amount of music on to them even @ 128MB. Might not be entirely useless. Oh, and do they have card slots? If so, a Gig of MiniSD or Transflash is available from ~$11-13 at reputable dealers and could put them back in the 'quite usable after all' category.
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