No end in sight: fraud with used hard drives continues

Data recovery companies need spare parts to repair hard drives. But they too can fall victim to fraudsters when buying on eBay & Co.

External hard drives sold as new with old internals.

(Image: Attingo)

Mar 27, 2026 at 1:27 pm CET

2 min. read

c't Magazin

By

Lutz Labs

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. But fraudsters are also inventive when it comes to exploiting the distress of others. The data recovery company Attingo recently bought some external hard drives for spare parts, primarily from lesser-known manufacturers like Storite, Suhsai, and Bnehhov. Unlike us, Google knows the company Bnehhov: The AI summary calls it "a brand that focuses on innovative, compact electronic products and accessories, including external CD/DVD drives, hand warmers, and beauty tools like hot air brushes."

Contrary to the manufacturers' advertising claims, the drives installed in the USB enclosures turned out not to be new. For example, the data rescuers found a Western Digital hard drive from 2021, but also a Samsung drive from 2009 – more than 15 years old, but still functional.

All were formatted with the exFAT file system, which is rather unusual for hard drives – Microsoft specifically developed exFAT for flash drives. Worse still, the data rescuers found old data remnants beneath the exFAT formatting. Since the drives were sold as new, this is definitely fraud.

Fraud with used hard drives sold as new is by no means new. Last year, a reader reported anomalies with a Seagate server hard drive purchased as new, which escalated into a worldwide fraud case involving many thousands of drives. Fraud with USB hard drives is also widespread.

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Branded goods also affected

Attingo also purchased a USB hard drive from Intenso, which, unlike the models described above, was sold as refurbished, i.e., used but at least tested. However, the specialists found recoverable data on this drive as well, which should not happen with such drives.

According to Attingo, Intenso wants to minimize risks in the future and improve internal quality assurance – regarding the current case, it was stated that the deletion at the upstream supplier was likely insufficient.

Despite currently high prices for hard drives and SSDs, we recommend not to fall for cheap offers. The current case shows once again that one can too easily fall for fraudsters.