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@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".

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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.