A player buys a new hard drive for his computer, taking advantage of a very cheap offer. However, in the end, he falls for a few scammers. Behind this is a popular scam that has been used for years.
Every player needs a lot of storage space when they want to install new things on their computer. A user wanted to extend his storage space particularly cheaply and took advantage of what seemed like a good offer.
In the end, he bought an HDD with 2 TB of storage. But when he wants to install the hard drive, he has to realize that he can only use 160 GB of the 2 TB (via reddit.com).
When he finally opens the hard drive, he has to find out that he has been fooled. Scammers sold him an HDD that officially offers 2 TB of storage. Inside, however, there is only a cheap hard drive with 160 GB of storage.
Scammers sell large storage devices that deliver significantly less
Scammers often play with the ignorance of buyers and offer USB sticks with 4 TB of storage for seemingly little money. Especially storage devices and products with a lot of storage for very little money often turn out to be fake. You can find such offers not only on sites like Aliexpress but also on Amazon, where such “cheap” products are also listed.
Partially, the scammers also modify the software of the hard drive or the memory controller on the circuit board, so that the device initially pretends to the operating system that it actually offers 2 TB of storage. The hard drive only reports an error when you try to exceed the actual value of the built-in memory. In the case of the user, this is about 160 GB.
Even official products affected: Even with supposedly secure manufacturers, you can receive a fake product: Scammers also like to buy popular models from Samsung and replace the real SSD with a smaller and cheaper model. Many customers only notice this when they want to write a lot of data or when they actually open the SSD. This is shown, for example, by the testers from HowtoGeek.com.
By the way, with the free tool H2testw, you can quickly check if the product can write the correct amount of data to an SSD or USB stick. If that is not the case, you usually have caught a fake.
Do not buy seemingly great offers and look at the reviews
Can you protect yourself against this? Yes, stay away from very cheap offers. An SSD with 16 TB for less than 100 Euros? You can be pretty sure that something is not right here. Especially when you compare the price with real prices, you will quickly realize that you would rather have to pay around 350 Euros for a 16 TB SSD.
Generally, it is also worth taking a look at the reviews or comments on Amazon or relevant purchasing sites: If people complain about the poor quality or that the product does not hold what it promises, you should also keep your hands off it.
An example of what such a problematic offer on Amazon might look like can be found in the following article on MeinMMO: Offers on Amazon lure with 8 TB SSD for a meager 80 Euros – Stay away from it and spare yourself the frustration
