Beware fake hard drives sold online

Amazon.com shoppers should be wary of fake but positively-reviewed portable hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs) selling on its marketplace.

Review Geek recently found several 16TB portable  HDDs and SSDs from unfamiliar brands on Amazon selling for around $100 (R1,700) or less.

Typically, a portable HDD with that much capacity sells for several hundred dollars, while large-capacity portable SSDs are even more expensive.

“Start a search for a 16 terabyte (TB) external hard drive, and you’ll get dozens and dozens of entries,” said Review Geek’s Josh Henderson. “Most are from completely unheard-of brands like ‘WIOTA’ or ‘SAJIULAS.'”

Aside from the strange brands, the pictures for the drives were very similar, with a seemingly generic portable drive and photoshopped text edited on top of it.

While these factors should raise some red flags, the overwhelming number of five-star reviews on the products would suggest they were legit, at least to anyone unfamiliar with Amazon’s historical problems in dealing with fake or paid-for reviews.

To confirm his suspicions that the drives were fake, Henderson bought one advertised as a 16TB external hard drive (inexplicably, also labelled as a portable SSD in the same listing).

The drive’s box contained the following specifications:

• USB 3.0 Micro B to USB 3.1 Typc_c (Gen 1).
• M.2 Portable SSD
• 16 “Terrabytes”
• Compatible with smart TVs, Android, Windows 7, 10, and | OS

After some testing, he quickly discovered the first three specifications were incorrect.

Despite Windows detecting the drive as a 16TB unit, the actual capacity was only 64GB, and the drive could only write data at USB 2.0-like speeds.

Opening the drive revealed the truth — it was actually a regular microSD card fitted to a circuit board that served as a USB-C adapter.

Fake portable SSD sold on Amazon.com. Credit: Review Geek/Josh Henderson

Henderson explained the reason why Amazon had not detected the scam product was likely because the dodgy seller had initially posted it as something else and updated its details for “accuracy” over time.

This common dubious practice is known as a listing takeover and can include changing the product’s name, description, and images.

Henderson determined this by looking at the reviews of the fake drives, many of which seemed to be legitimate experiences of other products — like a steering wheel cover.

In response to Henderson’s query over the issue, Amazon said it did not allow product listings to be taken over or incorrect information to be listed, and had zero tolerance for fake reviews.

“We have clear policies that prohibit reviews abuse, and we suspend, ban, and take legal action against those who violate these policies and remove inauthentic reviews,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “The items in question did violate our policies and they have been removed.”

However, Henderson said the products had, in fact, not been removed. The products he had pointed out remained listed on Amazon’s marketplace.

MyBroadband searched for 16TB portable HDDs and SSDs on Amazon.com and also found several suspicious models from unknown brands with claimed capacities of 7TB, 11TB, and 16TB.

In our case, the listed products had the exact same design but came in different colours. Lifestyle images supposedly showing the drives in use were also identical.

MyBroadband previously bought and tested a suspicious 2TB USB flash drive from Wish, and found that sellers there were also trying to knowingly mislead customers.

Like the fake hard drive merchants on Amazon, unscrupulous manufacturers use hardware tricks to make your operating system think the drive is larger than it actually is.

Pricing is a big red flag

If an online shopping powerhouse like Amazon is as susceptible to fraudulent products, then it is likely that smaller marketplace providers — including those in South Africa — could also be targeted.

Pricing should be one of the clearest indicators that a product could be fake.

At the time of writing, the cheapest portable hard drive on Takealot with 16TB storage was a Seagate unit priced at R7,999.

The largest portable SSDs available had 4TB of capacity and were also from reputable brands like Crucial and Samsung, selling for around R10,000.

The image below shows examples of Amazon.com product listings for portable HDDs/SSDs that are likely fake.

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