I'd not heard of these but From the USB_usb_modeswitch man page:

Several new USB devices have their proprietary Windows drivers onboard, most of them WAN dongles. When plugged in for the first time, they act like a flash storage and start installing the Windows driver from there. If the driver is already installed, it makes the storage device disappear and a new device, mainly composite with modem ports, shows up.

On Linux, in most cases the drivers are available as kernel modules, such as "usbserial" or "option". However, the device shows up as "usb-storage" by default. usb_modeswitch can send a provided bulk message (most likely a mass storage command) to the device which is known to initiate the mode switching.

I don't think I'll be able to help but I agree with DaveRo that the first step is to find out exactly what the device is. There may also be some messages from dmesg that could be useful.