topic Re: Fake hard drives in Selling

Fake hard drives

conroy11 — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 07:06:27 GMT

There has been messages about fake hard drives being sold on Ebay for several years and Ebay is doing nothing about it. I urge every body who has been duped by these drives to make a complaint. It appears all Ebay is interested in is making money, not looking after members.

Re: Fake hard drives

sugar249 — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 07:26:03 GMT

What do you propose Ebay do about it, personally go and check every hard drive.

There are fakes sold of heaps of products on all Platforms and Bricks and Mortar.

Not saying it is right, but offer a viable solution instead of just saying Ebay needs to fix it.

Re: Fake hard drives

imastawka — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 08:00:19 GMT

Ebay has the Money Back Guarantee.

If it doesn't match the description, the buyer opens a case for Item Not as Described and gets their money refunded.

What more do you want ebay to do?

Re: Fake hard drives

davewil1964 — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 08:40:09 GMT

Let me guess -

They are from foreign sellers;

They are significantly cheaper than real drives from reputable Australian sellers.

Generally you get what you pay for.

Caveat emptor

Re: Fake hard drives

pjs04 — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 08:29:25 GMT

I recently saw a couple of sellers offering cheap Seagate Basic portable hard drives in capacities 2TB, 4TB and 5TB with prices ranging from about $45 to $55 Australian. I decided to purchase a couple of the 5TB hard drives. They took nearly 2 weeks to arrive.

What I received is a couple of what look like Seagate Backup Plus Slim drive boxes with two "drives" that look like Backup Plus Slim drives. I had ordered 5TB drives but the ones I received are in slim housing (about 12mm tall) that Seagate only used for capacities up to 2TB; with Seagate's actual 4TB and 5TB drives being about 20mm tall. The external boxes look vaguely legitimate, but neither the boxes nor the drives have Seagate's usual drive labels listing model and serial number details.

When connected to my Windows PC, a window opens for a drive labelled "Seagate" with 4.76TB free. Using Hard Disk Sentinel software the drive identifies itself as a "SDK SSD" with capacity of 4882.8GB. All my real 5TB Seagate drives are "ST5000LM000-xxxxxx" (where xxxxxx is a 6 character ID string) that have a capacity of 4657.4GB. Notably the drives don't exhibit any vibration typical of a spinning hard drive, and mount in Windows about 2 seconds after being connected.

This is what one of the drive looks like from the top:

I popped the lid off one of the drives and this is what I saw:

Basically there is a micro-SD card reader, glued in place at the USB Port end of the case, with one micro-SD card fitted, and a lump of metal for added weight held in place with double-sided mounting tape. Here's a view of the label side of the micro-SD card once taken out of the reader:

I put the micro-SD card in my own reader and the drive again came up as the same "SDK SSD" with capacity of 4882.8GB. It seems the card has firmware that identifies at as having severely exagerated capacity. I've yet to run additional tests so I'm not sure of the actual drive capacity, but I'm pretty certain the drive will start to overwrite itself once the real capacity is exhausted. A quick Google search of the large number printed on the card gave no results, but the "128" suggests a possible real capacity of as much as 128GB; which is a decent amount for a casual user to write to the drive as a test.

Re: Fake hard drives

countessalmirena — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 08:46:09 GMT

The price should have alerted you.

Open a SNAD dispute (Significantly Not As Described). Just state that they are not as described and don't have the stated capacity. Don't go into extensive detail: just the minimum fact. Don't mention that it's not a genuine Seagate product unless you have a statement on letterhead from the actual company. Seller must provide return postage label or other way of returning the items - and if seller doesn't provide this, you need to escalate the dispute when this option becomes available.

Can you post the item number here? (You can't mention the seller's name, but item number is fine.)

Re: Fake hard drives

davewil1964 — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 09:07:39 GMT

So you bought what you knew were fakes, given the price.

What is your question/complaint?

Seagate don't do budget basic afaik

Re: Fake hard drives

sugar249 — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 09:32:44 GMT

Can hardly open an item not as described case, they have opened it. has to be returned in original condition. They knowingly knew they were fakes.

Re: Fake hard drives

pjs04 — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 12:09:30 GMT

Yes I fully expected the drives I purchased to be fake, but you always hope for a bargain arising from some distributor's fire sale.

A Best Match search for "Seagate 5TB" gave me about 10 listings with drive prices that would suggest the drives are fake. Some are supposedly by domestic sellers while other are from sellers in China. All are using stock advertising images, but there appear to be no images showing higher profile 4TB and 5TB drive images.

As an example item 186099264717 offers Seagate USB 3.0 portable drives ranging from 1TB for $42.99, up to 5TB for $49.99.

There's no obvious way for a casual buyer to know which drives are real. And lots of sellers offering drives at similar price points might lead buyers to think these prices are now legitimately "in the ballpark".

Re: Fake hard drives

countessalmirena — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 17:52:10 GMT

In that case… it really means that you’re not buying in good faith.

A buyer who bases their idea of what’s reasonable in price for a genuine item cannot possibly do so by looking on eBay and going for the mean or the average or most prevalent. They’ve really got to look for the RRP - which is around 4 times higher… or 3 times higher on sale at the moment with a quick look on an authorised Australian seller’s website.

I’ve said this so many times, because it seems to me that quite a few buyers still think eBay is a magical place of true bargains where somehow genuine items for some reason or other can be had without any markup or middleman or the costs associated with a genuine dealer having to pay staff/rent/GST, etc… or indeed well below the actual cost price.

It just isn't! This pretty fantasy is a marketing story used consciously by purveyors of fakes with either brand name or left unbranded.

Buy unrealistically cheap, get garbage. This is why we’re inundated with Chinese listings on eBay Australia. Australians have a reputation as prize chumps… embarrassing.

Re: Fake hard drives

sugar249 — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 19:38:24 GMT

@pjs04 wrote:
Yes I fully expected the drives I purchased to be fake, but you always hope for a bargain arising from some distributor's fire sale.

So you have intentionally set out to buy fake hard drives, to support dodgy sellers. It is because of people like you (bad buyer), that dodgy sellers are still in business.

The best way to stop them is to not buy from them.

Looking at your past purchases, you enjoy buying from sellers with bad feedback, stop encouraging them.

Please don't encourage bad sellers.

Re: Fake hard drives

sandypebbles — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 21:37:48 GMT

If a casual buyer 'does'nt know' it is up to them to check what they are buying

Then again, I'm not into buying fake garbage from dodgy sellers

Stop supporting dodgy as sellers and keeping them in business

Re: Fake hard drives

springyzone — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 21:42:13 GMT

@pjs04 wrote:
Yes I fully expected the drives I purchased to be fake, but you always hope for a bargain arising from some distributor's fire sale.

A Best Match search for "Seagate 5TB" gave me about 10 listings with drive prices that would suggest the drives are fake. Some are supposedly by domestic sellers while other are from sellers in China. All are using stock advertising images, but there appear to be no images showing higher profile 4TB and 5TB drive images.

As an example item 186099264717 offers Seagate USB 3.0 portable drives ranging from 1TB for $42.99, up to 5TB for $49.99.

There's no obvious way for a casual buyer to know which drives are real. And lots of sellers offering drives at similar price points might lead buyers to think these prices are now legitimately "in the ballpark".

I would agree a lot of casual buyers fall for this sort of thing. Ebay, I think, has encouraged (in its ads) the perception that you can pick up bargains on its site. But a bargain is one thing and a wildly unrealistic price is another.

Where you hit the nail on the head though is when you say

There's no obvious way for a casual buyer to know which drives are real.

That's pretty much why casual buyers should steer clear of buying this sort of thing on ebay.

But as you say, they see a whole lot of sellers all listing this sort of thing at a particular price point and think-hey, the retail stores are ripping us off, much cheaper to buy here.

As for your own particular situation, I agree with countess in that I would make a claim for significantly not as described, if I were you.

Put it back together. I know technically, you are supposed to return an item totally untampered with, but technically, a seller is supposed to provide exactly what is described in the ad too.

Just say it doesn't have the stated capacity. With luck, you should win your claim and the seller will have to refund you.

There is no way ebay can vet all these ads. They can't go out and check each hard drive. They don't have a lot of incentive to stop these types of sellers as after all, the sellers are supplying a product and quite probably a lot of buyers don't know any better and are quite happy with the fakes, at least at first, and give positive feedback.

Your best way to hit back at a seller who has sent out a fake item is to get your money back from that seller and then leave neg feedback to say the drive was nowhere near the stated capacity.

As someone else said, steer clear of the word fake though as otherwise they may get the feedback removed.

Re: Fake hard drives

papermoon.lady — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 00:22:54 GMT

Because you are not supposed to open a HD, the best way to test its real capacity is to use a software program like h2testw.

As springy said, you could still try if you know how to put it back together, but normally the best way to test a HD is to use h2testw (or any similar software).

Sadly, the more buyers buy from these sellers, the more they support them, not only in terms of money, but also of fake reputation because eBay gives sellers who sell a lot nice titles like "top-rated" even if they have horrible feedback, or "one of eBay's most reputable sellers".

Additionally, many naïve buyers just connect the HD to their computer, think the capacity is fine and give the seller positive fb, and as fb cannot be changed on eBay, when they find out the capacity is not real after adding more files, it is too late (not only for the fb, but often also for a case).

Re: Fake hard drives

sugar249 — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 03:37:54 GMT

@springyzone wrote:
@pjs04 wrote:
Yes I fully expected the drives I purchased to be fake, but you always hope for a bargain arising from some distributor's fire sale.

A Best Match search for "Seagate 5TB" gave me about 10 listings with drive prices that would suggest the drives are fake. Some are supposedly by domestic sellers while other are from sellers in China. All are using stock advertising images, but there appear to be no images showing higher profile 4TB and 5TB drive images.

As an example item 186099264717 offers Seagate USB 3.0 portable drives ranging from 1TB for $42.99, up to 5TB for $49.99.

There's no obvious way for a casual buyer to know which drives are real. And lots of sellers offering drives at similar price points might lead buyers to think these prices are now legitimately "in the ballpark".

Put it back together. I know technically, you are supposed to return an item totally untampered with, but technically, a seller is supposed to provide exactly what is described in the ad too.
Just say it doesn't have the stated capacity. With luck, you should win your claim and the seller will have to refund you.

Nope cant do that, as OP says it shows up on windows as having the correct and he is only making an assumption that it is not the correct capacity based on the 128 in the part number of the SD card. And the only way he would know that is by having opened the device. Now I am sure you are not suggesting that OP tell a porky Pie.

OP suspected it was fake, still went ahead and purchased it, opened it up. OP deserves to loose their money

Re: Fake hard drives

imastawka — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 03:42:24 GMT

pjs04 is not the OP.

They jumped on an existing thread.

But I agree, pjs04 should lose their money, and stop supporting these sellers.

Re: Fake hard drives

sandypebbles — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 03:47:12 GMT

They also made the comment

'There's no obvious way for a casual buyer to know which drives are real'

But they happily and knowing support a dodgy seller selling fakes, helping them stay in business

So zero concern for the casual buyer

Re: Fake hard drives

sugar249 — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 04:43:49 GMT

@imastawka wrote:
pjs04 is not the OP.

They jumped on an existing thread.

But I agree, pjs04 should lose their money, and stop supporting these sellers.

Ah yes, my mistake. I did mean pjs04

Re: Fake hard drives

arctoph_49 — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 00:29:16 GMT

@pjs04 wrote:
I put the micro-SD card in my own reader and the drive again came up as the same "SDK SSD" with capacity of 4882.8GB. It seems the card has firmware that identifies at as having severely exagerated capacity. I've yet to run additional tests so I'm not sure of the actual drive capacity, but I'm pretty certain the drive will start to overwrite itself once the real capacity is exhausted. A quick Google search of the large number printed on the card gave no results, but the "128" suggests a possible real capacity of as much as 128GB; which is a decent amount for a casual user to write to the drive as a test.

A no-brand micro-SD card with inflated capacity. It probably won't last long, not even for its true capacity.

You are not supposed to tamper with an item, but I would try to open a case anyway. The photos speak for themselves.

Re: Fake hard drives

sugar249 — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 01:48:36 GMT

@arctoph_49 wrote:
@pjs04 wrote:
I put the micro-SD card in my own reader and the drive again came up as the same "SDK SSD" with capacity of 4882.8GB. It seems the card has firmware that identifies at as having severely exagerated capacity. I've yet to run additional tests so I'm not sure of the actual drive capacity, but I'm pretty certain the drive will start to overwrite itself once the real capacity is exhausted. A quick Google search of the large number printed on the card gave no results, but the "128" suggests a possible real capacity of as much as 128GB; which is a decent amount for a casual user to write to the drive as a test.
A no-brand micro-SD card with inflated capacity. It probably won't last long, not even for its true capacity.
You are not supposed to tamper with an item, but I would try to open a case anyway. The photos speak for themselves.

Yes the photo's do speak for themselves, the item was opened how can you justify opening a case. Sadly knowing Ebay they will win,