Redditor buys suspicious drives on eBay just to report the scamming sellers if they get a fake SSD or HDD — latest '16TB' find has weights and microSD card hot-glued inside the enclosure to make it feel legit

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Unfortunately, this age-old scam still works.

a microSD card and board with weights hot glued inside a drive enclosure
(Image credit: u/Hartkralle/Reddit)

A Reddit user shared the 16TB SSD they bought on eBay for less than $30 (EUR 25), which only contained a board and a microSD card hot-glued with some weights to make it feel like a legitimate drive. u/Hartkralle shared their find, saying that they buy from these suspicious listings when they come across them. Since eBay has a robust consumer protection policy, they get their money back while the seller loses their account.

16 TB SSD for only 25€? What could go wrong?
 from r/pcmasterrace

"I buy one, check if it's legit or not, and if not, [I] report the seller to eBay. I get my money back, and they (the seller) lose [their] account,” u/HarkKralle said in a comment. “If I couldn't ensure that the money would flow back, I wouldn't do it.”

Another Redditor said that they appreciate what the OP was doing, but they were “99.99% positive” that the scammer would have another account in an hour. The OP replied, saying, “Possible, but even that it's an hour they cannot use to scam people and proof/information for more people that scams like this exist.”

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Scams like these have been around for decades now. One commenter even added that back in the ‘90s, they used high-quality 60-minute VHS tapes for their work, but one time received cheap, low-quality tapes that could only hold five minutes of footage instead. The sample that u/Hartkralle showed is also relatively low effort. Because of the ongoing memory and chip shortage, we’ve seen exceptionally good clones of Samsung 990 Pro SSDs, one of the best SSDs you can buy today. They have become so sophisticated that the most reliable way of spotting if they’re fake is to check them on CrystalDiskInfo.

One of the downsides of these fake drives is that you won’t get the read and write speeds that you’d expect from a modern SSD. But the bigger issue here is that using them could lead to complete data loss. For example, the fake drive that u/Hartkralle bought reports a capacity of 16TB, but the microSD card inside it is only 60GB. So, if an unsuspecting user transfers more than 60GB of data, they’d end up corrupting everything stored in the drive.

A 2TB Amazon Basics Portable SSD already costs almost $360, while an 8TB SSD from reputable brands like SanDisk, Crucial, or Lexar already hit $850. So, someone who doesn’t follow developments in the tech industry and stumbles across this cheap drive might think they’re getting a steal, when, in reality, they’re the ones being stolen from. Thankfully, eBay’s consumer protection allows people who were scammed, intentionally or otherwise, to get their money back — that is, if they know they were scammed in the first place.

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Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • USAFRet
    This has been a thing for years.

    https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/buyer-beware-16tb-or-larger-external-portable-ssd-usb-drives-are-fake.3773032/
    Reply
  • Greywulffcvg
    Out of curiosity, I paid $9.65 on Amazon Haul for what claimed to be a 2TB "Portable SSD External Hard Drive. The outside of the box it came in was labeled 2TB but inside the box it only claimed 64GB. Connecting it to a PC, the PC said it had 64GB. I wrote and read some data, but I'm not planning to use it for anything except some experiments. I have also seen ads for drives claiming as much as 16TB for less than $10.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    Greywulffcvg said:
    Out of curiosity, I paid $9.65 on Amazon Haul for what claimed to be a 2TB "Portable SSD External Hard Drive. The outside of the box it came in was labeled 2TB but inside the box it only claimed 64GB. Connecting it to a PC, the PC said it had 64GB. I wrote and read some data, but I'm not planning to use it for anything except some experiments. I have also seen ads for drives claiming as much as 16TB for less than $10.
    All of those are fake, and do NOT have the stated capacity.
    I wouldn't trust it to hold a single 2k txt file.

    Waste of your time and money.
    Reply
  • Stomx
    Ebay management does not care what people sell. All Li-ion battery capacities claimed sometimes as more than 2-3x the best what major producers have are fake and fake for 20 years there and they do not care and users do not care and lawyers do not care.

    Salespeople like Walmart, Home Depot etcetcetc do not care that most of products do not last -- the more you buy the more they profit.

    Car manufacturers do not care that their engines will not last 100-150k miles while most heavy trucks' engines working in heaviest imaginable duty regime last minimum 1 million and many 2 million miles. They, same like memory producers, for sure do not have conspiracy in doing that but look - all do that in full synchronization and consumers have zero force to change that
    Reply
  • cyrusfox
    Would be great if someone utilized AI to get rid of these scams though, especially on platforms like ebay and amazon. I don't see them on Mercari... I have personally bought used Li-Ion packs from ebay and scored great deal ($60 for a 13s6p 18650 pack, 40-60 mile range on my e-bike). You do need to know what you are lloking for. Its the same with car parts on ebay though, hard to find anything I would trust.
    Reply
  • Greywulffcvg
    USAFRet said:
    All of those are fake, and do NOT have the stated capacity.
    I wouldn't trust it to hold a single 2k txt file.

    Waste of your time and money.
    It was not a waste of time or money. I got essentially what I expected, and my testing so far indicates it is much better than your comment states (although obviously not the advertised 2TB).
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    Greywulffcvg said:
    It was not a waste of time or money. I got essentially what I expected, and my testing so far indicates it is much better than your comment states (although obviously not the advertised 2TB).
    Good luck.
    Reply
  • 1noway128
    The best part of this, at least in the US, is that shipped from China, the only remedies are to give you your money back and keep the item, or they pay to ship it back to China. Guess which they ALWAYS choose?

    Seems like a good source for free 60GB microSD cards.

    I did the same thing with rechargeable AA, C, etc batteries. You can simply weigh them to know that the (impossible) capacities are not going to be had. But the AA's work perfectly fine for weeks in TV remote controls, so there is that.

    Only way to win this battle IMO is to make them lose money on every deal. As was already mentioned though, the majority probably have no clue they SHOULD be testing the products they receive, and thus have no idea they aren't getting the proper product, and thus the scammers continue to make enough money to keep it profitable.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    I have two experiences with buying SSDs from sellers on Amazon and Ebay, possibly worth mentioning.


    The Amazon seller shipped Micron OEM SSDs in an anti-static bag that were folded in such a way as to make it almost impossible to determine the model of the SSD without opening. And they would not accept returns of opened drives.

    I got around this by shifting the drive in its bag so that the label wasn't covered by the sticker sealing the bag (which wasn't easy, because the bag was folded very tightly). Then, putting the drive in direct sunlight and holding my phone at such an angle where it wasn't blinded by the reflection. Enough light got through that I was able to clearly photograph the drive model and see that it was not the advertised model, but rather a lower-end QLC substitute (still Micron-branded and of the stated capacity).

    I was able to return the drive for a full refund. I packaged it more carefully than they did, which I recall was just wrapped in bubblewrap and stuffed in a paperboard envelope.


    The ebay seller shipped the the correct drive, but it was a 2242 "new pull" drive in an antistatic bag and thrown in a paperboard envelope, without any padding or reinforcement. It worked okay, but I was pretty annoyed at how recklessly packed it was. This was like 6 months ago, before SSD price rises had really started to filter down to the ebay prices on used or "open-box" new drives.


    BTW, both sellers were US-based. With the de minimis exemption gone, I wasn't about to take any chances ordering anything from China.
    Reply
  • das_stig
    Ebay should just Ai search for these drives and ban the accounts until sellers can prove otherwise, sure they mayget a few false positives, but sure it would be high 90% accurate, show consumers that they take fraud serious and want to be a reputable market place.
    Reply