Amazon... more like SCAMazon - Fake SSDs

this is obviously fake a 16 terabyte SSD for a hundred and ten dollars sales way past too good to be trueville clear into you must have been trying to get ripped off a list or at least you would think that for the average Shopper it is shockingly easy to run into scam products on the world's largest e-commerce platform look at this a quick search for external SSD yields real real real real real fake on the second line but come on minus you might say no one would buy a one star rated product from okqk okay which is fair enough but what about these ones with nice prices dozens of positive reviews and Prime shipping fake fake fake and yet Amazon is somehow allowing these scammers to not only list their Wares but to achieve prominent positions and search results what's going on over there Jeffy you too busy riding in your rocket to take care of your customer I mean maybe but also no the process that these companies use to defraud both unsuspecting Shoppers and Amazon themselves is surprisingly Savvy and kind of like Draconian anti-cheap methods cracking down on them could end up harming the legitimate sellers more than it harms the Bad actors just like it would harm me to not tell you about our sponsor build Redux they make it easy to configure your new build with support guides to help along the way they also offer competitive pricing as compared to building a PC yourself head to build redux.com Linus and start your new build today let's open up with a look at our two attempts to play ourselves here first up is a two terabyte USB 3.1 portable SSD from lurcher that is 36.99 from the products page on Amazon it says that its features are three inch hard drive and type c Port compare that to the 120 dollars of greedy Western Brands and even if it does lack a loop for a strap or some ruggedization it's a no-brainer right for a tech-minded audience this this difference in price would actually be a huge red flag but guys self in the shoes of your uncle who spends more time deweeding his garden than defragging his discs I mean look at this hand trowel it's probably not a scam a 70 discount might not seem like an obvious problem I mean even in tech there are categories like cables for example where you could easily spend a fifth of the price if you aren't subsidizing a bloated marketing budget or paying an influencer tax okay even at the price that's a good screwdriver independently verified I don't want to hear about it lttstore.com let's give this thing a fair Shake right what the heck this is not a good sign I already what are these it's crap already in ways I couldn't have possibly expected it comes with a micro b to USB a adapter and a type c to USB a adapter but even though it's color-coded blue this is in fact a USB 2.0 adapter because you can see the other five pins aren't in there okay extruded aluminum case I see what you mean about it being difficult to open this thing up this is going to not be easy once again USB 3 color-coded actually USB 2 cable is that actually a standard thing like the yes that's like specified by USB there's some non-standard colors like Razer does green yeah I've seen that OnePlus does red I've seen purple ones I've seen yellow ones for like higher power or whatever but blue means USB 3. in theory how suspicious these two ssds from very different brands use the same elements of their images why why are there pictures of hard drives to represent ssds does the same as two ssds in it you know what we'll get to that one later 19 megabytes per second reads I like it thank goodness it's type c and empty it is not high speed you say more like speed I don't think that's being in the video is it still running yeah it's just taking absolutely forever to write the test file to it something is definitely a miss here but even though the product page didn't specify a rated speed when we clicked buy it's actually been updated since then to reflect its USB 2-ness this product isn't necessarily a scam yet it's just really slow it does take liberal use of the word of the term USB 3. yeah yeah USB 3 ish it supports part of the USB 3.0 standard if you plug it into usb2 yeah if you plug it into a USB 3 Port it will be detected now tell me something Adam do you know the answer to this already can I actually play back anything that's on it surprisingly yeah really yeah I couldn't believe it either because I assumed at first it would just be like a 32 gigabyte we've seen that scan before where they just play around with the firmware of the device to make it show a large capacity but when you actually try to write data to it it turns out that it's not actually there and if you try to read it back it's just gone I mean you go look in the the device properties here we'll see we'll see here because the device properties will report correctly oh my goodness can we just play this file please here we go oh wow it's at a hundred percent use playing a video it is red footage you put all red footage on it because it's four gigabyte increments so I'm loading it and tell when how much it when it actually would die gosh darn it Adam it was a clever maneuver one of the issues we're running into here is if they are pulling a capacity scam maybe the actual capacity is 128 gigs or 256 gigs it would take us forever to fill this thing can I play back this file yes Hey look it's my baby boy use space 176 gigs okay free space wait vendor Co yes yes this is the vendor code product code USB device just leaving placeholders I guess assuming they're running a firmware capacity hack is giving them too much credit oh wow it's so slow you can actually see it looking for the next block of man I don't think I have the patience to find out if they're running a capacity scan let's just the fact that it put 170 gigs on it is like actually makes it not a terrible deal what like 16 for 128 gigs this drive is copying at zero bytes per second right now Adam it's a terrible deal it's terrible product can't handle it at its lowest you don't deserve it at its best I need to not stab my hand with this okay well things are about to get interesting hey there we go yep that is a nand package it is actually hot glued and not screwed to the slits what what appears to be just about the cheapest smallest controller I can possibly imagine can confirm this is not wired for any kind of USB anything other than USB 2. I'm going to try and peel this glue off and then we can check the part number of this I pretty much promise you that that is not two terabytes we just didn't manage to completely fill it up because that would take a long time Adam I'm afraid that this may not survive oh no the operation okay here we go let's see if we can get a part number off this thing zoom in on his face stop chip name no name two perfect that's really helpful this is apparently a 64 gigabyte chip this is the closest match we found it's almost certainly this from bolo here which would indicate that this is a 64 gigabyte chip that means that the way it's continuing to copy more data is that it is deleting older data which would explain when we're writing to it the high speed low speed because it's not like there's any caching or anything so it's got to be deleting stuff in the background scamazon what about this 16 terabyte drive though at 100 bucks there is no way that this is real when you consider that a brand name eight terabyte internal drive will cost more than 10 times this price for a 16 terabyte drive so we're not going to waste time pretending this one could be real we're just going to skip to cracking it open oh shoot and nothing of value was lost oh this one's got a purple USB 2 cable cute surprise surprise it's the exact same oh no it's not the exact same drives oh what did the did the Chinese scammers rip off the other Chinese scammers I'm serious it looks like one of these molds is a rip-off of the other one because this one has these these lines from the mold here in the exact same oval shape as this one but then this one has marks from the tool pass and this one doesn't I can't tell who's ripping off who I can tell that they both ripped off me uh this one just has a Micro SD card in it once again cheap controller a little bit of nand Flash and uh hot glue to the rescue again to keep everything in place I'm not aware of a 16 terabyte SD card but who knows maybe they have some amazing secret technology there that I've never heard of before 64 gigs again wait why am I laughing I just spent a hundred dollars on a 64 gig SD card that's not funny that sucks while I and you have the technical knowledge to be wary of stuff like this and have the know-how to verify a product's functionality within that all-important return window it's easy to imagine that many buyers will inspect their item for obvious damage then go back to binging Netflix or whatever they were doing until they get around to really using it sometime later and that's not dumb it's not unreasonable to expect that you can trust that a product is what you actually ordered I mean consider this Raphael junf the proud owner of Three anti-barking Dog deterrents all purchased on the same day gave it five stars and there's even International praise Amazon customer says she loves the blue cube eggs so much wait a second bags this review is about a completely different category of product even though on first glance the product page for this thing seems perfectly legit what you're looking at here is the Wombo Combo of Amazon scammer tactics the first is one that you're almost certainly familiar with fake reviews can be created on mass by either Bots or humans and especially with recent developments in large language models like chat GPT they can be difficult to detect with 100 accuracy that explains just listing is great or whatever but it doesn't explain how that tote bag review ended up there Ah that's something different that was added to the product page using a process called review merging basically the seller takes an old listing of an actual product and then abuses their ability to edit that listing by changing literally everything about it but leaving the reviews in place this makes the product appear to have been sold to real customers and reviewed well by the aforementioned real customers while being much less expensive than paying real people to sit and write reviews and much are order to detect than simple bot generated reviews and it has the added benefit of boosting search rankings let's say they started with a product from a super high volume category like socks for example then they take that sock and they convert it to a portable SSD all of a sudden it's on the best seller list and then a quick ad spend later it's in the sponsored posts and boy does Amazon ever make an effort to mix sponsored placements in with regular ones now of course you're probably thinking at this point all that sounds like a pretty short-term Play Can't Amazon just block the product and refuse to issue their payment when the negative reports roll in in theory yes but think about how that might work while some people will use the thing right away figure out its crap with an SD card in it and report back they are likely to be a very small percentage of the kind of people who would order something like this people who are not that technical in the first place right and so these companies knowing that they're dealing with a more mainstream user can use a number of strategies to stall this process first they can engineer firmware hacks that will report different specs than the actual Hardware kind of like what we saw with the misreported capacity here and with the fake GPU scams that we've investigated in the past this will dramatically delay the time between customers receiving the item and figuring out that it's bunk and all their data is actually gone they can also Gaslight you you have a bad cable did you try updating your drivers they can easily string someone along for a week or more with useless troubleshooting steps and it's even possible that deep enough into that process the customer will end up deciding screw it maybe this is just too complicated for me it was 20 bucks I don't care that much another thing to consider is that even for a completely non-functioning product most people don't go straight for a negative public review I mean I'm pretty understanding stuff happens right so it makes sense that you would contact the seller for a replacement but at that point well they can just lie and say oh I'm so sorry you've got a deal away one that was the wrong capacity uh uh let us replace that for you I mean most people aren't going to think to open up the chassis Google a part number on the nand package and figure out exactly what this is especially if doing that could compromise their ability to get a warranty replacement or a refund they can also try to buy you off by compensating one user for changing their review to five stars they might be able to keep their listing up long enough to scam another 5 or 50 or 500 people and then finally once those negative reports do finally start to pile up they can appeal them all of this is in service of keeping those listings up and looking legitimate for as long as possible or at least long enough to get their bi-weekly payout from Amazon so yes Amazon could just not pay them but if they were to reduce the frequency of their payouts or if they started overzealously withholding payouts from legitimate sellers the damage to their brand could be catastrophic the solution to that then is to just garnish anything that the seller owes from the next payout but if that seller is banned then there isn't going to be another payout and any customer refunds at that point are going to come out of Amazon's pocket unless again they want catastrophic damage to their brand by letting the customer foot the bill of course there is another option fraud is by its very definition illegal literally everywhere on Earth so why doesn't Amazon just take legal action against these companies and get their money back this might seem off topic but stick with me here have you ever wondered what's up with the Rando names that Chinese companies use to Brand their Wares I mean do they not have Google Translate to come up with something coherent actually no but surely they do have a dictionary right yes but here's the thing if you want to sell on Amazon you need to have a trademark and using real pronounceable words greatly increases the odds of somebody else having already trademarked your name even if it is something stupid like dong swipe so if your business model then involves scamming people and inevitably being reported and banned from the platform then you're going to need a lot of trademarks so you make gibberish names like govindaven or detective then when you get banned you just change a single letter file a new trademark and boom you're back in scans I mean business and these businesses are I'll call them operations are constantly spinning up new shell companies in order to obfuscate business Partnerships move funds and to dodge responsibility here's a great example Nai I has been caught with their pants down here or well at least their vendor has look at all these generic listings that are just waiting to be filled in by their seller if yeah that doesn't sound like a burner account not even a little back to the idea then of getting money back from these guys even if China's legal system was fair and transparent and respected the right foreign entities cost of going after hundreds or thousands of these individually small scale scammers that have completely disappeared Into The Ether would almost certainly be greater than the return so it seems that Amazon has made the decision that the cost of compensating the victims of these scams is lower than the cost of preventing them in the first place even if that means their entire shopping platform turns into a hellscape well sort of they apparently did spend 400 million dollars in 2019 combating spam and scams but there are just practical limits to what you can do I mean take the review merging exploit for example I mean sure they could just restrict everyone's ability to edit their product pages but if they did that then legitimate sellers would struggle to correct errors or ensure that their Pages accurately reflect any small product revisions like say for example a new color that's available by the way in the US through the YouTube player itself so go check that out I mean that's just one exam sample of a legitimate reason that product ratings and reviews should survive a page edit it's the same grade insulated water bottle just in a new fun white and red color scheme right or like what if you had a USB 3 product and all of a sudden you needed to change it to reflect the new USB 3.2 gen 1 nomenclature so I don't have the solution other than to remember the old adage if it seems too good to be true it might just be a good deal but it also might be a scam you know what else goes the segue to our sponsor Squarespace running your own business can be hard but making your website doesn't have to be with Squarespace you get an all-in-one platform that makes it easy to get your website up and running quickly you can grow your business online through their marketing features including 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,303,478

Keywords: amazon, fake products, fake amazon, scam, amazon scam, amazon prime scam, scammed, fake, grift, fake ssd, 16tb ssd, hard drive, external hard drive, fack ssd, fak essd, is my ssd busted, external hard drive doesn't work, slow hard drive, slow ssd

Id: QOhLlvNlI20

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023