There are an awful lot of fake storage drives available to buy online. These are not just cheap or low quality devices, but they are actively designed to trick you. They are fakes. Scams.
We just had another one sent to us to store customer data, so here’s our latest public announcement post.
Looks legit?
Not only do the fakes appear to be normal at first glance, they are hacked to appear as the advertised capacity to your computer. They come in all shapes and sizes to mimic real devices. And we just can’t resist opening them up to see what’s inside. This most recent one had an unbranded 58GB (!?) SD card hot-glued to a USB adapter board, and a bunch of wheel balancing weights stuck inside to give the illusion of a heftier item. These are not accidentally bad, they’re straight up scams.
Behind the mask 🎭
The worst thing about a 58GB SD card masquerading as a 4TB drive, is that the first 50GB of data you store on it will probably seem OK. The speed will be terrible compared to a real SSD, but you may not notice that. As you approach the limit of the storage, data is just discarded instead of being written, so you’d better hope your data exists somewhere else. If not, you’ve just sent it straight through a digital vaporiser. Also, that will usually cause the original 50GB of data to become corrupt, so it’s now all gone. In some cases the original 50GB may be recoverable, but the rest is definitely not. Instead of storage capacity you’ve got lumps of iron.
Thou shalt not judge a book by its cover
Thou shalt not judge Lethal Weapon by Danny Glover
Thou shalt not judge an external disk by its shiny aluminium cover
Remember the old adage “if it’s too good to be true then it probably is.”
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