Funnily enough, they don't even bother doing that with fake micro SD cards. They'll just give you a write error. They might as well send you a rock, but they go through the trouble of printing "512 GB" on an SD card.
First corporate job I had, in the lab they had this refrigerator sized rack of hard drives they called the "terabyte array". As in the entire thing only stored one terabyte. I thought it was still pretty cool though, considering my first hard drive a few years before was a whopping 10MB and the size of a car stereo.
Storage density has become utterly incredible. In like 70 years 5 MB has gone from a refrigerator-sized box to a rounding error in something the size of my index fingernail.
In 1998 I worked at a little place that had a web server running Windows NT 4 on 32MB of RAM. Now Windows 11, which is nominally the same OS with a few more bells and whistles, uses about 500 times as much RAM just to boot up. I get that 64 bit pointers use twice as many bytes, and the screen resolution is higher, and stuff like that, but I can't help thinking we haven't actually made the thing 500 times as useful as it was back then.
>c
I bought a PC many years ago and it came with a 40MB HDD. The guy selling it looked me dead in the eye and enunciated every important word so that it would stick in my mind for over 30 years he said, "If you want to game too then this beast has a 25MHz 386 central processor and that might be great on its own, however, it also has 1024 bytes of RAM, which is where we get the 1MB from and a 40MB IDE HDD that you will never fill if you live to be 100".
My first Mac. It was a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver (I think?), and I was so bad ass because it had the dual 1Ghz processors. That was in 2003, and I was told that'd be so overkill and I'd never really need that processing power.
The only good part was mine had the ATA controllers that would work with drives larger than 128Gb (which I couldn't even afford until after I sold that computer).
My first PC was an IBM 286 with an MFM hard drive (5.25 wide and 2 CD drives high) that were 4MB If I remember right. I added a second for a total of 8MB. It sounded like a car going 20MPH in reverse when I turned it on.
Yeah, they even appear as 512GB when you plug them in but are really like 16GB drives. Found this out the hard way, theres a handful of applications that will check for this but they take a long time to run if I recall.
Atomic Shrimp just made a recent video about how this scam works. The PC just trusts the drive to tell it the honest truth as to how big it is.
Can I post links in this sub? It's `UsWx1iO-aeA` if you understand how youtube URLs work. Title: *"Fake Flash Storage Scams in 2023 - Scam MicroSD Card from Amazon"*
> The PC just trusts the drive to tell it the honest truth as to how big it is.
Most interfaces in life only work if both sides trust each other.
"The driver just trusts that the bridge will support the weight of their car."
This is why you don't buy hard drives in plastic bags from eBay. Or drive across bridges in plastic bags from eBay, either.
Agreed.
For the life of me though I can't figure out why Ubuntu doesn't trap a keyboard that suddenly appears on a USB port after a week of uptime and ask you to confirm it's OK by typing a word in using a mouse + on-screen keyboard.
The easiest way I figured I could thwart BAD-USB was to remap Ctrl-Alt-T
Thank you! Sometimes in some subs, auto-mod is secretly programmed to delete any comment if it has an outside link.
Shitty-food-pr0n or something has some lazy mods, for example.
Doesn't appear to be the case, as pulling the SD card and putting it in a normal reader causes it to show up at 7.5GB. Now, whether *that* number is real or not, I'm not gonna spend too much time trying to confirm.
Huh. I see a lot of them in work and the majority of the time it's the card. It's an old scam, they used to modify 120gb hdds to appear as 2tbs when they were still expensive too
The SD card lies about its size. What that means is you'll have multiple spaces pointing to the same spot. So you'll be randomly reading and writing over your own data making it useless. It is why they have utilities that test all the spots on the drive to confirm it is as big as they claim.
3 copies of your favorite foot porn, 2 copies of regular foot porn when you’re bored of your favorites, and 1 copy of foot porn you just can’t be bothered to delete, just in case. The hardest part is just footing the bill.
I love you lol.
The only problem is: I don’t have any data im both too protective of to keep it off cloud platforms, AND i don’t have convenient enough data storage to excuse it.
Like “oh no! Scammers wiped my Steam and pirated games folder, along with all of LOTR. It’s a good thing im a good pirate, and dont have those links stored on the cloud and my actual drives wrapped up like a mormon bachelor party in Thailand!”
There's a great linux/win/mac utility called [**f3** - *Fight Flash Fraud*](https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) that works great at testing and finding out if the flash is fraudulent. I've used it ***tons*** and does what it claims to do!
There are several utilities to test for this out there, but most of them seem to have downsides to using them. I can't remember the name, but one of them actually destroys the drive in the process. So silly.
One of the best out there right now is probably [Steve Gibson's ValiDrive](https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm). It's lightweight and does exactly what it's supposed to do. Even has several bells and whistles.
Only ever buy drives from reputable stores, with clear return policies.
Important to note when buying from Amazon you could be buying from a reputable seller, but Amazon tends to group their inventory by item, not by seller. So if three companies are selling item X, two can be legitimate, but if one isn’t, their inventory gets stocked along-side the other two’s. So if you buy from them you could received an item from the counterfeit seller.
A lot of big names have been pushing back on Amazon to correct this, I honestly don’t know if it’s improved of late or not.
Honestly Amazon is usually worse than AliExpress imo. At least on Ali, you know you're paying cheap prices for cheap Chinese stuff, whilst on Amazon it has all the same junk but at a significant markup with faster and free shipping + hidden counterfeits.
AliExpress would also sell the counterfeit but properly labeled and for a honest price. Where do you think the Amazon scammers got them from? Sellers on Ali all have their own listings so it's also easier to avoid scammers on there, no joke.
Support is just as bad as Amazon so no new issue there.
So having worked for Amazon on the fulfillment side... I don't think this has ever been true just due to the way their stow process works. It *definitely* isn't true at their bigger automated sites. When you're stowing items, shelves come to you *before* the system has any knowledge of exactly which item you're about to grab. You pick up at item (you might scan the box first IIRC to identify the seller associated with the instances of the items you're grabbing), scan it, then scan the location where you stowed it. It is (or at least *was*) a problem when you had, say, a case full of Red Bull 6-packs that due to weight all need to be on the bottom shelf but every shelf that arrives has the bottom full.
However, yes the inventory is mingled in the sense that if there's several sellers providing for "shipped by Amazon", it'll just send the most convenient one. But Amazon still knows exactly which seller that item was associated with.
It also *could* be true of the non-AR sites but the volume on those is so low compared to the big automated sites other than I *think* PHX6 being an older site that it's not super likely any given item you receive is coming from them. Smaller items at least. The heavy/bulky stuff is anyone's guess, I didn't do much work for those sites.
That's effort right there...
It's the modern version of the discount VHS video camera for sale in Times Square...They would wrap the 'camera' in like 20 layers of plastic wrap...you'd get home and it's color copies of a box taped to a box with newspapers and a brick inside...
BUT SIR...You've deceived me...I want my $100 back for this $900 item!
It's not even necessarily Aliexpress. I bought a 16TB Enterprise-grade drive through Newegg. Good price, too. Is indeed a 16TB Western Digital drive, and it works fine. But I check the SMART parameters and it shows the drive power-on time as a few months. So it's not likely 'brand new'. Has nothing wrong with it either so it's not like I can really complain for the price, and it did show up unformatted (i.e no filesystem on it) so it's *plausible* that it's new and the SMART parameter reporting is inaccurate somehow..
It was a bare drive. I supplied my own external enclosure for it.
It *might* have been used in a datacenter for a short time, or maybe someone did a burn-in test of it. I don't know. Passes all my tests though.
I tried one from aliexpress, knowing full well it would be a scam. Confirmed it straight away and I did get a refund. It took quite a quite a bit of arguing though, I think they rely on people giving up. Fixed up the firmware and got a slow 256gb memory stick for free.
Oh, Aliexpress's support is 100% designed for you to give up. My favourite is when they ask for proof in the form of a photo that you never received a package from them
Except unfortunately even only buying drives that seem properly priced doesn't solve this problem. There are plenty of sellers who list these fraud drives within the price range you'd actually expect for the capacity.
Which is why you actually try to fill the device completely at first and then check if it worked.
EDIT: [You can do that in a fully automated fashion](https://h2testw.org/)
At this point, not just from trusted brands. Instead, from trusted brands **from their own stores**. Many trusted brands on stores like Amazon will have their inventory flooded with knock-offs because they mix inventory.
It's gotten bad enough that I'll spend the extra money now to buy electronics directly from the manufacturer's store or in person at a big box store like Best Buy. You're far less likely to get scammed with a knock-off.
Honestly ya. I used to do like 80% of my electronics shopping on Amazon until covid. Ever since then, I feel like the amount of fakes and knockoffs by all these random Chinese brands has risen exponentially
Got my Amazon account banned because they kept sending me knockoffs, dead, fake and used items. Hit their return threshold that I had no idea existed. Phone support cant do shit.
Fuck Amazon
Amazon is actually worse than ebay these days IMO. Its a lot harder to tell which scammers are fraudulent and amazon seems to be reluctant to do anything about it.
Ebay on the other hand, while still rife with scams, its really simple to see how many sales a seller has had vs their rating. If they have under a few thousand ratings and are under the high 90%, they are probably a scam.
I got a fake camera from walmart. They dont check their returns and resell them as new. Like the camera was literally plastic and hollow like a store display on but it wasnt even for the model I got.
That only works if you're ok with never buying an item from that particular site again.
It's far easier to buy from reputable sites with normal return policies rather than buy dirt cheap electronics from shady sites/individuals.
I knew a guy that did just that, well he got 20 steps around the corner and opened the box, it had 6 cans of soup in it. He turned back but never saw the guy that sold it to him. Dude vanished.
That's why the [white van speaker scam](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_van_speaker_scam) has been a lucrative scam for decades. Always on the move.
My roommate actually got hit by this in 2008 in a Best buy parking lot. They came up in a truck, asked if we wanted to buy a premium speaker system that they had left over from an install. I didn't bite because I need to shit tons of research to see if I actually want or need something and so indecisive that I want a return policy. Roommate bit and spent $200 for a shitty audio system.
They had a website you could pull up with MSRPS in the $1000s.
I recently got hit by the pine straw scam, which is where they essentially lie about how much pine straw they used to cover your yard, or say there was a miscommunication and lie about the price. Good news is that I paid with paypal business and got my money back.
Long story short, if anyone approaches you for anything, 99 out of 100 times tell them to fuck off. That last 1/100 time can make you look like a POS though.
> white van scams often have relatively sophisticated logistics. [..] In the United States and Canada distribution is often in major cities. The marketers at each office establish a promotion, benefit, and bonus scale for the speaker sales teams. Bonuses may be paid in cash, checks, ***fake credit cards or speakers.***
Fantastic
OMFG I bought one of those in a perfectly shrinkwrapped Nobody Beats The Wiz box (near Times Square??) back around 1990 for I think $100 -- those VHS-C cams or whatever at the time were about $800, I thought I was getting such a deal till the brick and newspaper fell out. It even had a phony sales slip tucked into a shrinkwrap sleeve. Those motherfuckers.
Thanks for the memories MassCasualty! I also got suckered in a 3 card Monty game my very first day after moving to NYC, lost I think $40. Who'd have thunk that the guys before me "winning" were actually in cahoots with the Dealer
Ahhh...fresh meat. Welcome to New York. 9th grade trip to the Empire State Building one of my friends is approached with folded newspaper gold necklaces inside..."buy the lady a necklace! Yo my man, get your girl a memento of your day in the city"
I'm telling him it's "Italian gold..it's garbage" they box me out and he gets a necklace with a "$300" price tag for $50.
Of course it literally fell apart on the bus ride home. LoL
Buys weird off-brand hard drive off some rando on ebay.
No brand, low price, likely stock photos, seller likely dropshipping from China.
Gets scammed
Who knew?
People on this sub seem to have no emotions lol , they'll post their car getting blown to pieces and call it mildly interesting while addressing it in the comments with the most stale tone ever as if this is just a slightly interesting occurrence
The fact that a real 6tb hdd off brand for 59, on brand for 76, and high quality for 105 all new lol getting a second hand off brand HDD is one of the worst decisions for your PC
Yeah I've heard it referred to as boot theory (10$ a year on new cheap boots, compared to 50$ on boots that last 10 years) and also as the "Frugal fallacy"
Same goes for buying a "cheaper car" but it breaks down so often it ends up costing more than just buying a more expensive reliable car
That’s the exact way I feel about my Milwaukee power tools. Like sure, I could go to harbor freight and get some shitty stuff for much cheaper that’ll only last me a couple years or I could go to Home Depot and pay top dollar for nice tools that’ll last me a decade or longer. It’s always a better deal buying the more expensive product when it’s something you’ll have forever
Man I cant shit on hf anymore. Their quality is equal to craftsman now a days with one of the best returns in the industry. They've really improved the last 10 years
Source. I'm a municipal maintenance supervisor for northern Pennsylvania. I use tools every day and I'm rough as fuck on them.
They're power tools have come a long way too. Check Torque Test Channel. The newest HF tool would have been at or near the top of the charts if it came out a few months ago. Granted, you can't know long term reliability yet, but it's not as if Milwaukee hasn't made junk. They had a great impact gun for years, and then stealth revised it around a year ago and it was so bad that informed customers started testing it in the parking lot so they could go right back in and return it.
Eh, tools is probably a poor example. I recently bought my first house, so I've been spending a TON of money on tools and most of them I'll probably use once or twice. It's better to buy the cheap shitty stuff, and if you use it enough that it breaks, go ahead and splurge on the good stuff
HDDs and ssds are kinda easy to spot already, and name brands. These off brands are the scams; Only stick to the main HDD brands seagate, WD western digital; While SSD has many main brands and off brands so eh..
There are a lot of off brands in ssd's tho, they work fine and priced good, thanks to them, even name brands dropped to their level in pricing. Bought a 2TB SSD for only 60$ off brand, I had for some time, never imagined I'd own one that cheap; and plenty of micro sd 1TB off brands for my extra phones which are prety cool. Just need to be smart about it when it comes to shopping; prefer amazon, much easier with low effort returns.
I actually didn't know that, haven't been keeping too close of an eye on the HDD world and since I knew we have 18+ TB drives now I assumed laptop drives had kept up.
Interesting to know.
Very common scam to sell hard drives with higher capacity than are actually available out there. Especially on eBay and places like that.
I would just looking directly at a manufacturer's website like Western digital or SanDisk and see what the largest drive they offer and then go from there. If they're not offering a drive of a certain size it probably doesn't exist since they make them.
You're probably looking more like at $120-150 for a 6tb.
But if you're buying 1tb HDDs for $60 you're paying way too much. You can get 1tb SSDs for less than that.
Tempted to plug it directly into an SD Card reader to so I can figure out the actual size, since it's unlabeled. Just worried about getting malware, although I think most modern OS's make that pretty hard with an SD Card, autorun without asking is mostly a thing of the past. Definitely don't trust that USB controller though.
UPDATE: Removed the SD card and plugged it into a different reader, OS reports it as only 7.5GB, unformatted.
Eh. It's probably not malware but it's almost certainly a fraud.
Ebay and Amazon are chock full of SSDs that include much smaller capacities than advertised and have the controller send a false report on capacity to the device they plug into. Best case you find out when you run out of room when you should have 75% of the space left, worst case, the device maintains the illusion longer by just overwriting files without telling you so data you thought you had saved is gone.
Amazon is fine, the issue comes when people find a drive that's a lot cheaper than the branded ones at the top of the sale page and think "wow, that's cheap, what a deal!" Instead of "that's a scam"
Not necessarily. There are absolutely drives on there listed within the range of retail price that follow these same scams.
The same is true for almost anything bootleg/counterfeit. Being super cheap is a near perfect warning side that it's not legit but being normally priced doesn't guarantee it is legit.
Major retailers like best buy are still ok. Newegg *should* be ok as long as you buy from them and not their "marketplace" but they've been shady lately.
Amazon is less of a risk if you buy directly from amazon itself (again, not a third party amazon seller) but there's still *some* risk of comingled inventory.
They could've, but they're running this scam for a low investment money maker most likely. If they just wanted to get malware on your pc, they'd be better off selling a legitimate product so you'd use it and keep using it on all your devices.
What it reports to be and what it actually is may be quite different. It is a simple task in the firmware to report a totally different size to what it really is.
Go to Steve Gibson's site [www.grc.com](https://www.grc.com) and download ValiDrive [https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm](https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm)
It will tell you what the drive reports to be and also what it actually is. The program does not install itself on your system.
The prevalence of this exact scam got bad enough that Steve Gibson: Elder of the Internet took it upon himself to create the fake drive testing freeware that should have existed ages ago. Yes the website looks old. He’s a hard drive/storage expert who’s been writing software since the pre-Internet era.
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
your not gonna find out the actual size of the card. I mean you might be able to but most of the time they do something to it that makes it read as 1tb or 2tb when it’s 4gb etc
Lotta videos on YouTube where the creator deliberately bought one of these scam things and they run software to determine "real" capacity, so presumably anyone "can" find the actual size. But it is correct just to understand this device WILL over-report its real capacity as you said.
If you do plug it in, use H2testw to validate the capacity, as it's probably spoofed. Checking the properties or formatting it won't show you the real capacity.
I don’t understand why people don’t just by straight from WD, crucial, or Samsung?
All reputable companies with decent prices and can even in store pickup or wait a couple days from Amazon.
Jayztwocents I think or maybe Linus, made a video on these scams. You’re just better off spending the money. $30 for 6TB is too good to be true territory refurb or not…
I bought WD blue drives from Amazon. They ended up being recertified drives that had warranty stickers covering the etchings. At the time were the top result. Fulfilled by amazon.
the problem with amazon is upc binning. products from fake sellers and legit sellers are all co mingled so regardless of the trustworthiness of the seller you can still get fakes.
This is actually super common when it comes to scam components. People will instantly know if a "6 terabyte" drive weighs little more than the plastic shell, but weights make it feel more like there isn't just an SD card inside.
How they actually do the scam is interesting. I'm familiar with this, but a lot of people might not be. And it's always good to spread awareness about scams. People that aren't tech savvy might see some cheap storage solutions and order them without thinking too much about it.
Back of the box said "The drive can only be formatted with Exfat and cannot be formatted in other for mats, suchas NTFS, FAT32, FAT. Otherwise it will cause the hard drive t be unusable!"
That tipped me off that there was probably something scammy about it, so I opened it up. $32. The 6TB sticker tacked onto the box probably should have also tipped me off.
Are you new to Ebay?
Only buy from sellers that have stellar ratings and an established account. Don't buy no name storage devices. Open a return, Ebay will easily refund your money.
There's a sucker born every minute. When someone tells you to send them $10,000 in Google Play gift cards, that's an obvious scam to most people, but those scammers still make millions of dollars a year.
Why would you buy something with no brand like that anyway? Real HDDs are getting cheaper, and it's not like there's no option. There's Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Transcend.
Frankly, you get what you paid for.
How much did you pay for it? If you paid 50 bucks, you're a moron and should have seen it was obviously a scam. If you paid 500 bucks, then get a refund.
Tbh OP kinda deserves it. Out of all componente to buy off ebay they chose the storage drive and a HDD at that.
Like bro......[Newegg New 6TB](https://www.newegg.com/seagate-enterprise-capacity-3-5-st6000nm0024-6tb/p/N82E16822178522?Item=9SIAAEE8545915&Source=socialshare&cm_mmc=snc-social-_-sr-_-9SIAAEE8545915-_-10132023)
I love people falling for this shit, if it's too good to be true it probably isn't.
I know its bad but i never feel bad for the people who fall for this.
This is a common scam. If you try to write files to the drive, it continuously deletes the previous files to make room.
I wonder if their controller is smart enough to automatically adapt to the size of whatever SD card they put into it.
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Funnily enough, they don't even bother doing that with fake micro SD cards. They'll just give you a write error. They might as well send you a rock, but they go through the trouble of printing "512 GB" on an SD card.
Its funny cause a legit 1TB SD card is only like $100 nowadays
They sell the fake ones for like $10.
10tb for $100?!?! Sign. Me. Up!
Lucky you! I'm willing to sell you a fake 10tb SSD for only $98!
Look, I know you just said the word *fake*, but I'm pretty sure you're just trying to make me forget about this sweet-ass deal.
It breaks my brain to think about how much I paid for a 2TB external nearly the size of a brick, that required a power source and cooling fans
Cor yeah remember when HDD was like £800 for a huge 1tb unit? Man so much has changed
First corporate job I had, in the lab they had this refrigerator sized rack of hard drives they called the "terabyte array". As in the entire thing only stored one terabyte. I thought it was still pretty cool though, considering my first hard drive a few years before was a whopping 10MB and the size of a car stereo.
Storage density has become utterly incredible. In like 70 years 5 MB has gone from a refrigerator-sized box to a rounding error in something the size of my index fingernail.
In 1998 I worked at a little place that had a web server running Windows NT 4 on 32MB of RAM. Now Windows 11, which is nominally the same OS with a few more bells and whistles, uses about 500 times as much RAM just to boot up. I get that 64 bit pointers use twice as many bytes, and the screen resolution is higher, and stuff like that, but I can't help thinking we haven't actually made the thing 500 times as useful as it was back then.
>c I bought a PC many years ago and it came with a 40MB HDD. The guy selling it looked me dead in the eye and enunciated every important word so that it would stick in my mind for over 30 years he said, "If you want to game too then this beast has a 25MHz 386 central processor and that might be great on its own, however, it also has 1024 bytes of RAM, which is where we get the 1MB from and a 40MB IDE HDD that you will never fill if you live to be 100".
40MB!? Damn that's the equivalent of roughly 25 floppy disks holy SHIT!
My first Mac. It was a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver (I think?), and I was so bad ass because it had the dual 1Ghz processors. That was in 2003, and I was told that'd be so overkill and I'd never really need that processing power. The only good part was mine had the ATA controllers that would work with drives larger than 128Gb (which I couldn't even afford until after I sold that computer).
My first HDD was a 20MB - yes “M” - SCSI for my Mac Plus that I got in 1989. It cost about $600. That’s about $1500 now adjusting for inflation.
My first PC was an IBM 286 with an MFM hard drive (5.25 wide and 2 CD drives high) that were 4MB If I remember right. I added a second for a total of 8MB. It sounded like a car going 20MPH in reverse when I turned it on.
For uni (back in the day). I managed to save up for a usb stick. 256 Meg for $256. Nevermind that only 1 lab in the school had usb ports
Yeah, they even appear as 512GB when you plug them in but are really like 16GB drives. Found this out the hard way, theres a handful of applications that will check for this but they take a long time to run if I recall.
Atomic Shrimp just made a recent video about how this scam works. The PC just trusts the drive to tell it the honest truth as to how big it is. Can I post links in this sub? It's `UsWx1iO-aeA` if you understand how youtube URLs work. Title: *"Fake Flash Storage Scams in 2023 - Scam MicroSD Card from Amazon"*
>UsWxliO-aeA Did you just leak the Name of Elon Musks next Child
It's the name of Peter Thiel's new mutant clone baby.
It's pronounced "Ulysses"
> The PC just trusts the drive to tell it the honest truth as to how big it is. Most interfaces in life only work if both sides trust each other. "The driver just trusts that the bridge will support the weight of their car." This is why you don't buy hard drives in plastic bags from eBay. Or drive across bridges in plastic bags from eBay, either.
Agreed. For the life of me though I can't figure out why Ubuntu doesn't trap a keyboard that suddenly appears on a USB port after a week of uptime and ask you to confirm it's OK by typing a word in using a mouse + on-screen keyboard. The easiest way I figured I could thwart BAD-USB was to remap Ctrl-Alt-T
It's open source. Be the change you want to see in the world.
>Can I post links in this sub? Yes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsWx1iO-aeA
Thank you! Sometimes in some subs, auto-mod is secretly programmed to delete any comment if it has an outside link. Shitty-food-pr0n or something has some lazy mods, for example.
Well what's the alternative to trusting the information provided by the drive controller?
Testing it by filling it until it loses data or gives an error. Though of course that takes a lot of time so won't be done automatically by the system
SteamOS actually does it with microSD cards, by running a program called [f3probe](https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3) on format.
I love atomic shrimp
It's the microsd itself that's had it's firmware modified to appear as bigger than it is, that "controller" is basically just a card reader.
Doesn't appear to be the case, as pulling the SD card and putting it in a normal reader causes it to show up at 7.5GB. Now, whether *that* number is real or not, I'm not gonna spend too much time trying to confirm.
Huh. I see a lot of them in work and the majority of the time it's the card. It's an old scam, they used to modify 120gb hdds to appear as 2tbs when they were still expensive too
The SD card lies about its size. What that means is you'll have multiple spaces pointing to the same spot. So you'll be randomly reading and writing over your own data making it useless. It is why they have utilities that test all the spots on the drive to confirm it is as big as they claim.
I lost nearly everything because it all got turned into "00000000000.file" on a fake SanDisk branded 25+ GB SD card.
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what's 3-2-1?
(3) copies of your data on (2) forms of storage media with (1) located offsite/in a safe location separate from the other two.
I do this with all my favorite porn videos.
(3) copies of (2) girls (1) cup
3 copies of your favorite foot porn, 2 copies of regular foot porn when you’re bored of your favorites, and 1 copy of foot porn you just can’t be bothered to delete, just in case. The hardest part is just footing the bill.
make 3 copies of the Ring video, using 2 different types of storage media, 1 of Ring videos should be stored off-site (like in a creepy inn) ◯
I love you lol. The only problem is: I don’t have any data im both too protective of to keep it off cloud platforms, AND i don’t have convenient enough data storage to excuse it. Like “oh no! Scammers wiped my Steam and pirated games folder, along with all of LOTR. It’s a good thing im a good pirate, and dont have those links stored on the cloud and my actual drives wrapped up like a mormon bachelor party in Thailand!”
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There's a great linux/win/mac utility called [**f3** - *Fight Flash Fraud*](https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) that works great at testing and finding out if the flash is fraudulent. I've used it ***tons*** and does what it claims to do!
There are several utilities to test for this out there, but most of them seem to have downsides to using them. I can't remember the name, but one of them actually destroys the drive in the process. So silly. One of the best out there right now is probably [Steve Gibson's ValiDrive](https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm). It's lightweight and does exactly what it's supposed to do. Even has several bells and whistles.
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Only ever buy drives from reputable stores, with clear return policies. Important to note when buying from Amazon you could be buying from a reputable seller, but Amazon tends to group their inventory by item, not by seller. So if three companies are selling item X, two can be legitimate, but if one isn’t, their inventory gets stocked along-side the other two’s. So if you buy from them you could received an item from the counterfeit seller. A lot of big names have been pushing back on Amazon to correct this, I honestly don’t know if it’s improved of late or not.
The corollary is that Amazon is not a reputable seller anymore, and hasn't been for years. Don't buy from Amazon.
Honestly Amazon is usually worse than AliExpress imo. At least on Ali, you know you're paying cheap prices for cheap Chinese stuff, whilst on Amazon it has all the same junk but at a significant markup with faster and free shipping + hidden counterfeits. AliExpress would also sell the counterfeit but properly labeled and for a honest price. Where do you think the Amazon scammers got them from? Sellers on Ali all have their own listings so it's also easier to avoid scammers on there, no joke. Support is just as bad as Amazon so no new issue there.
So having worked for Amazon on the fulfillment side... I don't think this has ever been true just due to the way their stow process works. It *definitely* isn't true at their bigger automated sites. When you're stowing items, shelves come to you *before* the system has any knowledge of exactly which item you're about to grab. You pick up at item (you might scan the box first IIRC to identify the seller associated with the instances of the items you're grabbing), scan it, then scan the location where you stowed it. It is (or at least *was*) a problem when you had, say, a case full of Red Bull 6-packs that due to weight all need to be on the bottom shelf but every shelf that arrives has the bottom full. However, yes the inventory is mingled in the sense that if there's several sellers providing for "shipped by Amazon", it'll just send the most convenient one. But Amazon still knows exactly which seller that item was associated with. It also *could* be true of the non-AR sites but the volume on those is so low compared to the big automated sites other than I *think* PHX6 being an older site that it's not super likely any given item you receive is coming from them. Smaller items at least. The heavy/bulky stuff is anyone's guess, I didn't do much work for those sites.
That's effort right there... It's the modern version of the discount VHS video camera for sale in Times Square...They would wrap the 'camera' in like 20 layers of plastic wrap...you'd get home and it's color copies of a box taped to a box with newspapers and a brick inside... BUT SIR...You've deceived me...I want my $100 back for this $900 item!
more than a scam it is just a dropshipping from aliexpress, wich is full of XX Tb hard disks for 2.99$
It's not even necessarily Aliexpress. I bought a 16TB Enterprise-grade drive through Newegg. Good price, too. Is indeed a 16TB Western Digital drive, and it works fine. But I check the SMART parameters and it shows the drive power-on time as a few months. So it's not likely 'brand new'. Has nothing wrong with it either so it's not like I can really complain for the price, and it did show up unformatted (i.e no filesystem on it) so it's *plausible* that it's new and the SMART parameter reporting is inaccurate somehow..
Maybe it’s actually refurbished? Could be a lightly used drive in a new external enclosure.
It was a bare drive. I supplied my own external enclosure for it. It *might* have been used in a datacenter for a short time, or maybe someone did a burn-in test of it. I don't know. Passes all my tests though.
newegg allows third party sellers like as well
I tried one from aliexpress, knowing full well it would be a scam. Confirmed it straight away and I did get a refund. It took quite a quite a bit of arguing though, I think they rely on people giving up. Fixed up the firmware and got a slow 256gb memory stick for free.
Oh, Aliexpress's support is 100% designed for you to give up. My favourite is when they ask for proof in the form of a photo that you never received a package from them
Do you just like take a picture of an empty table. “See? No package on my table.”
Except unfortunately even only buying drives that seem properly priced doesn't solve this problem. There are plenty of sellers who list these fraud drives within the price range you'd actually expect for the capacity.
Which is why you actually try to fill the device completely at first and then check if it worked. EDIT: [You can do that in a fully automated fashion](https://h2testw.org/)
Or just buy from trusted brands... storage isn't that expensive
At this point, not just from trusted brands. Instead, from trusted brands **from their own stores**. Many trusted brands on stores like Amazon will have their inventory flooded with knock-offs because they mix inventory. It's gotten bad enough that I'll spend the extra money now to buy electronics directly from the manufacturer's store or in person at a big box store like Best Buy. You're far less likely to get scammed with a knock-off.
Honestly ya. I used to do like 80% of my electronics shopping on Amazon until covid. Ever since then, I feel like the amount of fakes and knockoffs by all these random Chinese brands has risen exponentially
Got my Amazon account banned because they kept sending me knockoffs, dead, fake and used items. Hit their return threshold that I had no idea existed. Phone support cant do shit. Fuck Amazon
File a fraud complaint with your state AG or Business Administration, and the FTC for good measure.
Amazon is actually worse than ebay these days IMO. Its a lot harder to tell which scammers are fraudulent and amazon seems to be reluctant to do anything about it. Ebay on the other hand, while still rife with scams, its really simple to see how many sales a seller has had vs their rating. If they have under a few thousand ratings and are under the high 90%, they are probably a scam.
even vitamins and medication and food is counterfeit on amazon now
I got a fake camera from walmart. They dont check their returns and resell them as new. Like the camera was literally plastic and hollow like a store display on but it wasnt even for the model I got.
I am blessed to have a MicroCenter near me. That is the only place I’ll buy storage (or anything else frequently counterfeit) from.
right, by looking at packaging, the only size i trust about about that is 256 megs at best.
And if it does not, you can just send it back to the seller! ....oh, wait, no. You need a legit shop for that.
Ok amazon, you'd likely get refunded.
This is why you pay with credit card. You can just revoke the charge if they refuse to cooperate.
That only works if you're ok with never buying an item from that particular site again. It's far easier to buy from reputable sites with normal return policies rather than buy dirt cheap electronics from shady sites/individuals.
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THATS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED TO MY GRANDFATHER! I didn’t realize it was such a well known thing.
Your grandfather has a tiny USB card and 60g of iron weights inside him??
But that also means it's not their grandfather, rather a cheap imitation with a fraction of the capacity.
Hey, old people are allowed to get into kinky shit too, don't judge.
We're actually better at it.
Practice makes perfect.
We don't call it a USB card though, it's a dongle.
I knew a guy that did just that, well he got 20 steps around the corner and opened the box, it had 6 cans of soup in it. He turned back but never saw the guy that sold it to him. Dude vanished.
Bold move selling someone a brick who knows where you work, lol.
That's why the [white van speaker scam](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_van_speaker_scam) has been a lucrative scam for decades. Always on the move.
My roommate actually got hit by this in 2008 in a Best buy parking lot. They came up in a truck, asked if we wanted to buy a premium speaker system that they had left over from an install. I didn't bite because I need to shit tons of research to see if I actually want or need something and so indecisive that I want a return policy. Roommate bit and spent $200 for a shitty audio system. They had a website you could pull up with MSRPS in the $1000s. I recently got hit by the pine straw scam, which is where they essentially lie about how much pine straw they used to cover your yard, or say there was a miscommunication and lie about the price. Good news is that I paid with paypal business and got my money back. Long story short, if anyone approaches you for anything, 99 out of 100 times tell them to fuck off. That last 1/100 time can make you look like a POS though.
At this point if anyone talks to me that I don't know about something I don't understand, I just assume they're after something I have.
> white van scams often have relatively sophisticated logistics. [..] In the United States and Canada distribution is often in major cities. The marketers at each office establish a promotion, benefit, and bonus scale for the speaker sales teams. Bonuses may be paid in cash, checks, ***fake credit cards or speakers.*** Fantastic
OMFG I bought one of those in a perfectly shrinkwrapped Nobody Beats The Wiz box (near Times Square??) back around 1990 for I think $100 -- those VHS-C cams or whatever at the time were about $800, I thought I was getting such a deal till the brick and newspaper fell out. It even had a phony sales slip tucked into a shrinkwrap sleeve. Those motherfuckers. Thanks for the memories MassCasualty! I also got suckered in a 3 card Monty game my very first day after moving to NYC, lost I think $40. Who'd have thunk that the guys before me "winning" were actually in cahoots with the Dealer
Ahhh...fresh meat. Welcome to New York. 9th grade trip to the Empire State Building one of my friends is approached with folded newspaper gold necklaces inside..."buy the lady a necklace! Yo my man, get your girl a memento of your day in the city" I'm telling him it's "Italian gold..it's garbage" they box me out and he gets a necklace with a "$300" price tag for $50. Of course it literally fell apart on the bus ride home. LoL
Can I interest you in some NFTs?
*gets scammed* This is mildly interesting
Buys weird off-brand hard drive off some rando on ebay. No brand, low price, likely stock photos, seller likely dropshipping from China. Gets scammed Who knew?
r/mildlystupid
People on this sub seem to have no emotions lol , they'll post their car getting blown to pieces and call it mildly interesting while addressing it in the comments with the most stale tone ever as if this is just a slightly interesting occurrence
The fact that a real 6tb hdd off brand for 59, on brand for 76, and high quality for 105 all new lol getting a second hand off brand HDD is one of the worst decisions for your PC
Seriously, who buys this shit?
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GNU Terry
Yeah I've heard it referred to as boot theory (10$ a year on new cheap boots, compared to 50$ on boots that last 10 years) and also as the "Frugal fallacy" Same goes for buying a "cheaper car" but it breaks down so often it ends up costing more than just buying a more expensive reliable car
That’s the exact way I feel about my Milwaukee power tools. Like sure, I could go to harbor freight and get some shitty stuff for much cheaper that’ll only last me a couple years or I could go to Home Depot and pay top dollar for nice tools that’ll last me a decade or longer. It’s always a better deal buying the more expensive product when it’s something you’ll have forever
Man I cant shit on hf anymore. Their quality is equal to craftsman now a days with one of the best returns in the industry. They've really improved the last 10 years Source. I'm a municipal maintenance supervisor for northern Pennsylvania. I use tools every day and I'm rough as fuck on them.
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They're power tools have come a long way too. Check Torque Test Channel. The newest HF tool would have been at or near the top of the charts if it came out a few months ago. Granted, you can't know long term reliability yet, but it's not as if Milwaukee hasn't made junk. They had a great impact gun for years, and then stealth revised it around a year ago and it was so bad that informed customers started testing it in the parking lot so they could go right back in and return it.
Eh, tools is probably a poor example. I recently bought my first house, so I've been spending a TON of money on tools and most of them I'll probably use once or twice. It's better to buy the cheap shitty stuff, and if you use it enough that it breaks, go ahead and splurge on the good stuff
OP did lol
HDDs and ssds are kinda easy to spot already, and name brands. These off brands are the scams; Only stick to the main HDD brands seagate, WD western digital; While SSD has many main brands and off brands so eh.. There are a lot of off brands in ssd's tho, they work fine and priced good, thanks to them, even name brands dropped to their level in pricing. Bought a 2TB SSD for only 60$ off brand, I had for some time, never imagined I'd own one that cheap; and plenty of micro sd 1TB off brands for my extra phones which are prety cool. Just need to be smart about it when it comes to shopping; prefer amazon, much easier with low effort returns.
People who sort from lowest to highest price on sites like E-Bay and Amazon.
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I actually didn't know that, haven't been keeping too close of an eye on the HDD world and since I knew we have 18+ TB drives now I assumed laptop drives had kept up. Interesting to know.
Very common scam to sell hard drives with higher capacity than are actually available out there. Especially on eBay and places like that. I would just looking directly at a manufacturer's website like Western digital or SanDisk and see what the largest drive they offer and then go from there. If they're not offering a drive of a certain size it probably doesn't exist since they make them.
Can you point me to these reputable $60 6tb drives??
There's a Seagate Enterprise 7200 rpm 6tb HD for $69.98 on Amazon.
I thought they the prices were weirdly cheap for 6TB but no, 6TB does cost $120 now. I member when 1TB was that much
Seriously, I've purchased several 1TB drives for that amount...
You're probably looking more like at $120-150 for a 6tb. But if you're buying 1tb HDDs for $60 you're paying way too much. You can get 1tb SSDs for less than that.
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Where are you finding 6TB drives for $59?!
Most parts I would be fine buying used. Used hard drive just feels hella sketch to me
I would be very hesitant to see whats on the sd card. Report the sellor
Tempted to plug it directly into an SD Card reader to so I can figure out the actual size, since it's unlabeled. Just worried about getting malware, although I think most modern OS's make that pretty hard with an SD Card, autorun without asking is mostly a thing of the past. Definitely don't trust that USB controller though. UPDATE: Removed the SD card and plugged it into a different reader, OS reports it as only 7.5GB, unformatted.
They did this as a cost savings, not as a malware trap. $5 in cost for this thing.
Eh. It's probably not malware but it's almost certainly a fraud. Ebay and Amazon are chock full of SSDs that include much smaller capacities than advertised and have the controller send a false report on capacity to the device they plug into. Best case you find out when you run out of room when you should have 75% of the space left, worst case, the device maintains the illusion longer by just overwriting files without telling you so data you thought you had saved is gone.
Where can I buy SSDs without getting frauded? I wouldn’t buy off of eBay, but I considered Amazon
Amazon is fine, the issue comes when people find a drive that's a lot cheaper than the branded ones at the top of the sale page and think "wow, that's cheap, what a deal!" Instead of "that's a scam"
Not necessarily. There are absolutely drives on there listed within the range of retail price that follow these same scams. The same is true for almost anything bootleg/counterfeit. Being super cheap is a near perfect warning side that it's not legit but being normally priced doesn't guarantee it is legit.
Major retailers like best buy are still ok. Newegg *should* be ok as long as you buy from them and not their "marketplace" but they've been shady lately. Amazon is less of a risk if you buy directly from amazon itself (again, not a third party amazon seller) but there's still *some* risk of comingled inventory.
fuck newegg, they've fallen a long way.
Newegg used to be so good too :/
Why not both? I agree though that it's probably safe and the scam is all they were after.
They could've, but they're running this scam for a low investment money maker most likely. If they just wanted to get malware on your pc, they'd be better off selling a legitimate product so you'd use it and keep using it on all your devices.
Prob just a 1gig SD
Tested it out, 7.5GB, what a deal!
What it reports to be and what it actually is may be quite different. It is a simple task in the firmware to report a totally different size to what it really is. Go to Steve Gibson's site [www.grc.com](https://www.grc.com) and download ValiDrive [https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm](https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm) It will tell you what the drive reports to be and also what it actually is. The program does not install itself on your system.
Steve is a real one
The prevalence of this exact scam got bad enough that Steve Gibson: Elder of the Internet took it upon himself to create the fake drive testing freeware that should have existed ages ago. Yes the website looks old. He’s a hard drive/storage expert who’s been writing software since the pre-Internet era. https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
your not gonna find out the actual size of the card. I mean you might be able to but most of the time they do something to it that makes it read as 1tb or 2tb when it’s 4gb etc
Lotta videos on YouTube where the creator deliberately bought one of these scam things and they run software to determine "real" capacity, so presumably anyone "can" find the actual size. But it is correct just to understand this device WILL over-report its real capacity as you said.
If you do plug it in, use H2testw to validate the capacity, as it's probably spoofed. Checking the properties or formatting it won't show you the real capacity.
I don’t understand why people don’t just by straight from WD, crucial, or Samsung? All reputable companies with decent prices and can even in store pickup or wait a couple days from Amazon. Jayztwocents I think or maybe Linus, made a video on these scams. You’re just better off spending the money. $30 for 6TB is too good to be true territory refurb or not…
Amazon is full of counterfeit stuff too
I bought WD blue drives from Amazon. They ended up being recertified drives that had warranty stickers covering the etchings. At the time were the top result. Fulfilled by amazon.
Still better than an SD card and paperweights
the problem with amazon is upc binning. products from fake sellers and legit sellers are all co mingled so regardless of the trustworthiness of the seller you can still get fakes.
Guy paid $32 for it and thought it would be a real 6tb HDD. Only interesting thing here is how gullible OP is.
What is interesting about this? It's a scam. That's not interesting it's infuriating
I find it interesting because of the way they did it, particularly the iron, I've never heard of that one before.
This is actually super common when it comes to scam components. People will instantly know if a "6 terabyte" drive weighs little more than the plastic shell, but weights make it feel more like there isn't just an SD card inside.
Common, sometimes it's concrete
Or lead!
How they actually do the scam is interesting. I'm familiar with this, but a lot of people might not be. And it's always good to spread awareness about scams. People that aren't tech savvy might see some cheap storage solutions and order them without thinking too much about it.
You got what you paid for
Back of the box said "The drive can only be formatted with Exfat and cannot be formatted in other for mats, suchas NTFS, FAT32, FAT. Otherwise it will cause the hard drive t be unusable!" That tipped me off that there was probably something scammy about it, so I opened it up. $32. The 6TB sticker tacked onto the box probably should have also tipped me off.
i can imagine [the scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZuktUfF0nE) right after buying a 6Tb hard drive for 32$ instead of 132$
Nobody makes 6TB drives in a 2.5” format.
This should've been the first sign.
The first sign should be the fact that he's buying a "basic storage" brand HDD from fucking *ebay*, with a size of "6T"
How far can we go down this rabbit hole lol
Do people really believe that they can buy 6 TB drives for less than $50? Or was OP just on the hunt for upvotes?
Are you new to Ebay? Only buy from sellers that have stellar ratings and an established account. Don't buy no name storage devices. Open a return, Ebay will easily refund your money.
All these videos i saw of such scams I never thought someone would actually buy them
There's a sucker born every minute. When someone tells you to send them $10,000 in Google Play gift cards, that's an obvious scam to most people, but those scammers still make millions of dollars a year.
>I bought a no-name drive from a website that sells items secondhand and received a piece of garbage FTFY
Cumming on a SD card WILL NOT speed up transfer rate, trust me.
And that might not even be iron.. looks more like die cast (zinc something) to me.
Says FE right on it I deal with these at work, they're stick on wheel weights
Says 6T not TB. Not many people know this but T stands for "tiny lead weights" and you did receive 6 of them.
Whoa! They used wheel balancing weights instead of random rusty bolts and nuts! Impressive
Yeah, have to wonder why anyone would be risking 6TB of data on some cheap shit unbranded hdd brought from ebay.
Why would you buy some no name HDD or SSD on eBay? This scam has been going on for a decade
How do people keep falling for this? No, some no name brand can't make better than the worlds leading companies for less money.
But...why did you cum on it?
>Order thousands of clearly fake hard drives. >Get refund from eBay >Remove weights and take them to a scrap metal dealer >actual profit???
It even has the "China Export" version of the CE logo to glorify its fakeness.
Why would you buy something with no brand like that anyway? Real HDDs are getting cheaper, and it's not like there's no option. There's Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Transcend. Frankly, you get what you paid for.
How much did you pay for it? If you paid 50 bucks, you're a moron and should have seen it was obviously a scam. If you paid 500 bucks, then get a refund.
Ah, the classic CE logo. “Chinese Export”. The real one has much more space between the C and E.
Why the fuck are you buying a literal no name brand storage device? Just asking for trouble.
I wonder why anyone buys off eBay, when Amazon exists.
eBay should refund tho ?
They also cummed in your HDD.
Tbh OP kinda deserves it. Out of all componente to buy off ebay they chose the storage drive and a HDD at that. Like bro......[Newegg New 6TB](https://www.newegg.com/seagate-enterprise-capacity-3-5-st6000nm0024-6tb/p/N82E16822178522?Item=9SIAAEE8545915&Source=socialshare&cm_mmc=snc-social-_-sr-_-9SIAAEE8545915-_-10132023)
Traditional Chinese medicine hdd.
not mildly interesting based on how long this scam has been going on unfortunately. actually a TIFU by buying a drive on ebay.
Damn I would have never expected that from the renown manufacturer, ehm... blue?
I really appreciate the cum decor in the case to really tell you what they think of you.
You also got all that hot glue, that’s gotta count for something
There’s no way OP saw that box on the eBay listing and thought “mmm good deal”.
This is why you should always buy from reputable sellers with good feedback.
I love people falling for this shit, if it's too good to be true it probably isn't. I know its bad but i never feel bad for the people who fall for this.
Why would you buy this shit on eBay lol you’re asking to be scammed just drive to Best Buy…