Before Black Friday: Warning about fake drives on Amazon's Marketplace

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There are still only three hard drive manufacturers worldwide: Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. However, when searching for external drives in USB enclosures, online marketplaces like Amazon or eBay offer not only models from these manufacturers but also from well-known brands like Intenso or Transcend – and those from UnionSine, Eaget, Pompeian, or Storite. While you can be sure that the hard drives built into the enclosures are new when buying USB hard drives from these manufacturers, as well as from Intenso and Transcend, this is not necessarily the case with models from the latter companies.

For years, external hard drives that appear to be new but actually contain drives that have been used for years have been circulating not only on Amazon. For buyers, the fraud is hard to detect, as the price difference to genuine new drives is often only a few euros.

The affected vendors usually operate in the Amazon Marketplace, which is the area where third-party sellers offer their products. Here, the company distinguishes between two business models:

• 1P (First Party): Amazon buys goods from brand manufacturers and resells them under its own name.
• 3P (Third Party): External sellers list products themselves, and Amazon merely provides the platform. Within this 3P business, there are two variants:
  • Sellers ship their goods themselves after receiving an order
  • or they use Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) – in this case, Amazon stores and ships the goods but does not own them.

Old goods, new packaging

Covert purchases revealed that supposedly new external drives contain used drives with tens of thousands of operating hours. In some cases, the USB enclosures contain drives from 2017, affecting all manufacturers – and in some cases, drives from HGST or Samsung, brand names that are no longer in use, were also found.

Technically, the drives are often still functional, but declaring them as new is clearly fraudulent. Many of these hard drives appear in the regular bestseller lists and not in the designated "Amazon Renewed" section, where used or refurbished devices should actually end up.

Many of these offers appear reputable: familiar form factor, appealing packaging, positive reviews. However, tricks have also been used here – for example, by hijacking reviews from other products; we even found reviews for olive oil under a hard drive.

The fraud can be detected in two ways: with the help of software or by unscrewing, or more likely, breaking open, the enclosure. This is also why Amazon's internal controls often fail: the goods stored by FBA for other sellers do not belong to the e-commerce giant, so the teams prefer to leave them alone. An opened package or, worse, an opened enclosure cannot be resold – if the suspicion is not confirmed, Amazon would have to bear the damage itself.

Of course, all this does not only apply to hard drives. Many USB sticks, memory cards, and USB SSDs have far less capacity than advertised – these cases have also existed for years. USB hard drive enclosures do not contain hard drives, but a small MicroSD card and some metal discs for the necessary weight; we have also encountered manipulated hard drives in terms of capacity.

Amazon's structural problem

The case highlights an ongoing problem with the Marketplace. Amazon's different business units – Retail (1P), Marketplace (3P), and Renewed – operate largely independently. This makes it unclear who is responsible for controlling problematic sellers. Internal audits are complicated because Amazon's intervention in FBA inventory is limited. Even when cases of fraud are discovered, the vendors often reappear under new names.

While Amazon emphasizes that customer protection is paramount, practice shows a different picture. Reports from manufacturers or buyers rarely lead to swift action. Other platforms like eBay are now considered more responsive in this regard: eBay usually removes problematic offers within a day after manufacturer complaints.

The fraudsters profit twice: they buy used hardware cheaply, sell it at almost new prices, and invest the profits in paid search placements to climb higher in the search results. This way, buyers searching for "external hard drive" often encounter dubious brands first, while genuine manufacturers appear lower down.

Buyer beware when purchasing hardware

A complete prevention of fraud is considered unrealistic – too many sellers, too little control. We recommend exercising caution: if you find large-sounding capacities at extremely low prices or products from small, unknown brands, you should be careful. Hard drives and SSDs from brands that transparently certify their products or are manufactured in-house are truly safe. Above all, before buying from unknown brands on Chinese trading platforms, you should be wary: EU law does not apply there, and the sellers often have untrustworthy names like xxstrading87, xuchanggaoyingba0, or chang-2123.

After purchase, the hardware can be checked with utility programs such as Smartmontools, Harddisk Sentinel, or Crystaldiskinfo. Our program H2testw, written specifically for fraud detection, also still serves well for detecting fakes despite its age. Further information on detecting fraud was provided at the beginning of the year – in the cases of fraud involving used server hard drives from Seagate.

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