You’ve probably heard the popular joke that “you can never be too rich or too good-looking.” If there was a computer equivalent, it would probably be that “you can never have too much processor power, or too big a hard drive.” The good news, where computers are concerned, is that both processors (by experts) and drives (by almost anyone) can be upgraded relatively easily and that there’s a booming market for those upgrades.
The corresponding bad news is that there are a lot of fraudulent sellers out there offering bogus deals, even major websites like those of Amazon and Walmart. Processor chips aren’t easily faked, but solid-state drives (SSDs) unfortunately are. If you’re in the market for an upgraded drive, here’s how to avoid being scammed.
What Is an SSD?
Traditional hard drives worked by encoding data on spinning discs coated with iron oxide. A set of magnetic heads could then read or write data, by choosing the correct spot on the discs and moving there. Those moving parts, of course, meant it took some time to find the data you were looking for. Over time, drives got bigger, spun faster and found data more quickly — but there were clear upper limits on their speed.
SSDs are different. At bottom they’re made up of memory chips, though not the kind used for your computer’s main memory. Consumer SSDs use a kind of chips called flash NAND, which can be read and written many times but unlike your computer’s memory won’t lose their data when turned off (NAND isn’t an acronym but a type of logic gate, which is an electrical engineering thing that’s outside the scope of this article). They’re faster than traditional hard drives by a lot: modern hard drives can transfer data at about 200 mb/second, while consumer SSDs can transfer data at up to 3500 mb/second.
Obviously we’re leaving out a lot of detail, but the short version is that SSDs are faster, quieter and draw less power than old-school hard drives. That’s why they’re found now in all but the cheapest devices. Unfortunately they also cost more than conventional hard drives, which is why there’s an opening for scammers.
Shopping Scams Are a Big Business
High-profile third-party platforms like the ones hosted by Amazon and Walmart have been a Really Big Deal in online shopping. Those companies already sell a huge range of products, but opening their sites to third-party sellers made it possible for almost anyone to sell almost anything there. Which is a good thing, as a rule, but it’s also opened the door for scammers to take advantage of their visibility.
And boy, do they take advantage. The FTC’s 2022 Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book records over 327,000 reports of shopping scams — good for second place among common forms of fraud — and total losses of over $358 million.
This kind of retail fraud can take a lot of forms, including:
- Products that are bogus copies of the real thing.
- Products that never arrive, despite the vendor saying they’ve shipped.
- Products that are used, damaged or reboxed.
- Products that aren’t what they say they are.
SSD scams typically fall into that last category, using various technologies to create a fake SSD that seems to work but in fact is not at all what it was supposed to be. Let’s take a closer look at how that works.
Anatomy of a Fake SSD Scam
Suppose you’re running out of space on your current drive and want lots more room for games, photos, music, cat videos … whatever’s your particular pleasure. If you go to any of the major sites and start searching, you’ll find that SSDs aimed at the consumer market usually top out at 2 to 4TB (a terabyte, for marketing purposes, is 1000GB), with a relatively small number of larger sizes available at prices ranging into the thousands of dollars.
Yet, over the past year, a number of third-party vendors have offered SSDs on major shopping sites that claim to offer an impressively large 16TB capacity for under $100. How is this possible? Well … it isn’t.
When reviewers and columnists smelled a rat and ordered units to evaluate, they discovered that the supposed SSD was actually just a compact flash card — the kind you’d see in something like your car’s dashcam or a pro-quality camera — with a much smaller capacity. The bogus drive’s interface simply lied to any connected computer, and pinkie-promised that it really was a big SSD. For one reviewer, at computer site ZDNet, the flash card inside didn’t even work.
It’s a Real Problem for Shopping Platforms
For companies like Amazon and Walmart, incidents like this are damaging because buyers don’t blame the actual no-name vendor: They bought from the Amazon or the Walmart website, so they blame Amazon or Walmart. After too many incidents, they’ll be tempted to stop using the platform altogether (and negative publicity certainly doesn’t help either).
The problem is, these sites work very hard at making it easy for entrepreneurs and new startups to sign up and list products on the platform. That’s what brings life — and eyeballs — to the website, and enforcing tough regulations on these small-scale vendors would defeat the purpose. This leaves websites playing a constant game of whack-a-mole, with shady vendors often returning under a new name within hours of being banned or delisted.
Major sites like Amazon will usually reimburse you for any fraudulent sales as a way to minimize that kind of reputational damage. That won’t always be the case with smaller online marketplaces, and if you get a bogus drive that appears to work it may take you months to even realize you’ve been scammed (and by that time, it’s usually too late for a refund). Even if you do get your money back, the whole incident still costs you time and stress. The site itself will also need to account for that added outlay, which over time drives up costs for everyone. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
Bogus SSDs Often Have Good Ratings
So how can you tell when you’re looking at a “likely-fake” product listing? Reviewers who’ve written about these on major computer sites knew at a glance that they were likely bogus, because the price was so far removed from what a legitimate product would cost. But if you aren’t a tech writer, you wouldn’t necessarily know that. You’d just be looking for a big drive at an attractive price, and these (apparently) fit that description.
Sadly, looking at the reviews won’t necessarily help either. Unsurprisingly, scammers who are already gaming the system by selling fake products have no scruples about gaming the reviews system, as well. Criminals can use multiple methods to recycle reviews for other, legitimate products and attach them to the new, bogus product; a practice that’s called review merging, review hijacking or review reuse.
Whatever you call it, the ultimate outcome is that a very shady product can appear to have hundreds or even thousands of positive reviews. That’s a problem for ordinary consumers.
Spotting a Bogus SSD
So how can you confidently order a good upgrade for your computer? There are several ways you can stack the odds in your favor. One is to shun “marketplace sellers” in general, and only buy directly from Amazon, Walmart and similar vendors (“sold and fulfilled by …” rather than “sold by [x] and fulfilled by Amazon/Walmart”). Of course that shuts out a lot of perfectly legitimate small businesses, so it’s not necessarily your best option.
Making a practice of actually reading the product reviews — not just looking at the star rating and how many reviews there are — helps a lot. If you find that you’re looking at a whole bunch of five-star reviews about a hairbrush or an electric rice cooker, you can reasonably assume that the entire listing is bogus. Similarly if there are a lot of reviews but they’re all clustered around the same date, and have much the same phrasing, there’s a strong likelihood those reviews are fraudulent.
Most importantly, take a moment to compare the price of the drive you’re interested in against others that cite similar specs. If anything else that seems comparable offers much lower capacity and speed, or comes in at a much higher price, that should be a big red flag for you. Think of it as getting quotes for having your roof done: if three contractors quote you $10,000 to $15,000, and one says he’ll do it for $500 and a case of beer, that lowest bid is probably not legitimate.
“If It Seems Too Good to Be True …”
Sadly there’s no equivalent to Spokeo’s people-search tools for online vendors. Most of them are located overseas to begin with, and they’re ready to switch to a new and equally bogus business name in a heartbeat.
At best, if you’ve gotten an email address or phone number from them in the course of your interactions, you can try running those through a Spokeo search. If it turns out that there is indeed a U.S. resident connected with the scam operation, this may help you in filing a complaint with law enforcement.
In short, the best thing you can do is simply to remember the age-old advice that “if it seems too good to be true, it usually is.” Just remembering that principle will do a lot to protect you from scams in general, not just those involving bogus SSDs.
Sources:
Tech Target – Logic Gate (AND, OR, XOR, NOT, NAND, NOR and XNOR)
U.S. Federal Trade Commission – 2022 Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book
ReviewGeek – Why the Heck is Amazon Selling these Fake 16 Terabyte Portable SSD Drives?
ZDNet – I Bought a ‘16TB External M.2 SSD’ for $20 and Got What I Deserved
Consumer Reports – Hijacked Reviews on Amazon Can Trick Shoppers