WTF?! There are few things more annoying than scammers who sell fake components. However, one Redditor is fighting back against this practice by purchasing suspicious items on eBay, then reporting the sellers when they inevitably turn out to be fakes. The latest find was a claimed 16TB SSD, offered for under $30, that turned out to be a board and a microSD card with some weights crudely glued on top.
User u/Hartkralle wrote in the r/pcmasterrace subreddit that when he comes across these scam listings and buys the items on offer, he gets his money back from eBay after reporting them and the platform closes the account.
One user pointed out that when these criminals have their accounts removed, they usually create another one within an hour. But Hartkralle said it's still one hour during which they aren't scamming people.
The recently purchased fake drive promised 16TB for under $30. Considering that a Crucial X10 8TB portable SSD costs $845 on Amazon, it's pretty obvious that the drive is fake. However, these scammers target less tech-savvy buyers who might not realize that.
In addition to offering much slower read and write speeds than a genuine SSD, the microSD card inside the fake drive has a capacity of just 60GB.
16 TB SSD for only 25€? What could go wrong?
by u/Hartkralle in pcmasterrace
This type of scam is far from new. Back in 2022, a third-party Walmart vendor was offering a generic 30TB M.2 external SSD for about $18. It turned out that the seller had taken two 512MB SD cards and modified the firmware to report each as 15TB. To make the deception harder to uncover, the scammers throttled the bus to 0.48Gbps instead of 5Gbps. As a result, anyone trying to verify the drive's full capacity with a tool such as H2Testw would face a scan time of roughly 500 days.
Hartkralle said he has carried out this eBay vigilantism two or three times. And while he doesn't often look for storage drives, he will investigate one if it appears too good to be true. As one user put it, Hartkralle is doing God's work – long may it continue.