Hard disk fraud: Details of the Seagate investigation
Seagate has commented to the British media on the measures the company is taking against the sale of used hard disks as new goods.
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More than 250 readers have now emailed us about their hard disks that were purchased as new but have already been used. Capacities of 4 to 16 TByte are affected, mostly drives from the Exos server series, and now more and more from the Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro NAS series. The fraud can be detected by software (such as smartmontools or Hard Disk Sentinel) and by querying the FARM values, and there are also some obvious signs on the housing and especially on the sticker.
An unnamed representative of Seagate has now provided the British online medium Blocks & Files with quite detailed information on the ongoing investigations.
In the statement, Seagate explicitly refers to the drives as “clearly used drives that are being fraudulently sold as new drives on the open market”. Most of these drives are said to originate from OEMs or a cloud provider, who take them out of circulation and then sell them on the open market as new. [Update: Seagate would like to clarify that the company does not believe that the OEM partners are involved in the fraud. They would merely place the drives on the used market, which is common and legal. Who then modifies these drives and sells them as new is the subject of the investigation].
Counterfeit stickers are common
The counterfeiting of stickers, as we have seen in the recent fraud cases involving Ironwolf drives, is quite common. Above all, the trick is used to upgrade drives, for example to turn an Ironwolf disk into a more expensive Exos. This is, of course, fraud. Even the sale of non-functional drives without inner workings occurs.
Seagate has its security and brand council. With the help of the authorities, Seagate eliminates resellers who have been found to be fraudulent. Most resellers, however, are not even aware that they have fraudulent inventory. In these cases, Seagate tries to work with the resellers to identify the supply chain.
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Seagate says it hates to see its customers fall victim to these fraudulent drives. The company has even hired an outside investigative firm to buy fraudulent drives and take the necessary legal action.
Seagate cannot prohibit dealers from purchasing Seagate drives from anywhere other than an official Seagate dealer. The so-called gray trade across national borders is also not legally contestable. However, Seagate may not be able to provide warranty services for a hard disk if it was originally intended for another region. This is primarily a problem if the disk was originally produced for the Chinese market.
Seagate continues to urge customers to email fraud@seagate.com if they suspect an issue. According to reports from a few readers, Seagate has already made offers to (pre-)exchange counterfeit drives. In principle, however, customers have a contract with their dealer. As far as we know, affected customers have no issues returning affected drives to the vast majority of dealers.
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