this is obviously fake a 16 terabyte SSD
for a hundred and ten dollars sales way
past too good to be trueville clear into you must have been trying to get ripped
off a list or at least you would think that for the average Shopper it is
shockingly easy to run into scam products on the world's largest
e-commerce platform look at this a quick search for external SSD yields real real
real real real fake on the second line
but come on minus you might say no one
would buy a one star rated product from okqk okay which is fair enough but what
about these ones with nice prices dozens
of positive reviews and Prime shipping fake fake fake and yet Amazon is somehow
allowing these scammers to not only list their Wares but to achieve prominent
positions and search results what's going on over there Jeffy you too busy
riding in your rocket to take care of your customer I mean maybe but also no
the process that these companies use to defraud both unsuspecting Shoppers and
Amazon themselves is surprisingly Savvy and kind of like Draconian anti-cheap
methods cracking down on them could end up harming the legitimate sellers more
than it harms the Bad actors just like it would harm me to not tell you about
our sponsor build Redux they make it easy to configure your new build with
support guides to help along the way they also offer competitive pricing as
compared to building a PC yourself head to build redux.com Linus and start your
new build today let's open up with a look at our two attempts to play
ourselves here first up is a two terabyte USB 3.1 portable SSD from
lurcher that is 36.99 from the products page on Amazon
it says that its features are three inch hard drive and type c Port compare that
to the 120 dollars of greedy Western Brands and even if it does lack a loop
for a strap or some ruggedization it's a no-brainer right for a tech-minded
audience this this difference in price would actually be a huge red flag
but guys self in the shoes of your uncle who
spends more time deweeding his garden than defragging his discs I mean look at
this hand trowel it's probably not a scam a 70 discount might not seem like
an obvious problem I mean even in tech there are categories like cables for
example where you could easily spend a fifth of the price if you aren't
subsidizing a bloated marketing budget or paying an influencer tax
okay even at the price that's a good screwdriver independently verified I
don't want to hear about it lttstore.com let's give this thing a fair Shake right
what the heck this is not a good sign
I already what are these it's crap already in ways I couldn't have possibly
expected it comes with a micro b to USB
a adapter and a type c to USB a adapter
but even though it's color-coded blue this is in fact a USB 2.0 adapter
because you can see the other five pins aren't in there
okay extruded aluminum case I see what you mean about it being difficult to
open this thing up this is going to not be easy
once again USB 3 color-coded actually USB 2 cable
is that actually a standard thing like the yes that's like specified by USB
there's some non-standard colors like Razer does green yeah I've seen that
OnePlus does red I've seen purple ones I've seen yellow ones for like higher
power or whatever but blue means USB 3.
in theory how suspicious these two ssds
from very different brands use the same elements of their images why why are
there pictures of hard drives to represent ssds does the same as two ssds
in it you know what we'll get to that one later 19 megabytes per second reads
I like it thank goodness it's type c and
empty it is not
high speed you say more like
speed I don't think that's being in the video is it still running
yeah it's just taking absolutely forever
to write the test file to it something is definitely a miss here but even
though the product page didn't specify a rated speed when we clicked buy it's
actually been updated since then to reflect its USB 2-ness this product
isn't necessarily a scam
yet it's just really slow it does take
liberal use of the word of the term USB 3. yeah yeah USB 3 ish it supports part
of the USB 3.0 standard if you plug it into usb2 yeah if you plug it into a USB
3 Port it will be detected now tell me
something Adam do you know the answer to this already can I actually play back
anything that's on it surprisingly yeah really yeah I couldn't believe it either
because I assumed at first it would just be like a 32 Gigabyte we've seen that
scan before where they just play around with the firmware of the device to make
it show a large capacity but when you actually try to write data to it it
turns out that it's not actually there and if you try to read it back it's just
gone I mean you go look in the the device properties here we'll see we'll
see here because the device properties will report correctly oh my goodness can we
just play this file please here we go oh
wow it's at a hundred percent use playing a video it is red footage you
put all red footage on it because it's four Gigabyte increments so I'm loading
it and tell when how much it when it actually would die gosh darn it Adam it
was a clever maneuver one of the issues we're running into here is if they are
pulling a capacity scam maybe the actual capacity is 128 gigs or 256 gigs it
would take us forever to fill this thing can I play back this file
yes Hey look it's my baby boy
use space 176 gigs okay free space wait
vendor Co yes yes this is the vendor code product
code USB device just leaving placeholders I guess
assuming they're running a firmware capacity hack is giving them too much
credit oh wow it's so slow
you can actually see it looking for the next block of man I don't think I have
the patience to find out if they're running a capacity scan let's just
the fact that it put 170 gigs on it is
like actually makes it not a terrible deal what like 16 for 128 gigs this
drive is copying at zero bytes per second right now Adam it's a terrible
deal it's terrible product can't handle it at its lowest you don't deserve it at
its best I need to not stab my hand with
this okay well things are about to get
interesting hey there we go yep that is
a nand package it is actually hot glued
and not screwed to the slits
what what appears to be just about the
cheapest smallest controller I can possibly imagine can confirm this is not
wired for any kind of USB anything other than USB 2. I'm going to try and peel
this glue off and then we can check the part number of this I pretty much
promise you that that is not two terabytes we just didn't manage to
completely fill it up because that would take a long time Adam I'm afraid that
this may not survive oh no the operation
okay here we go let's see if we can get a part number off this thing zoom in on
his face stop
chip name no name two perfect that's
really helpful this is apparently a 64 Gigabyte chip this is the closest match
we found it's almost certainly this from bolo
here which would indicate that this is a 64 Gigabyte chip that means that the way
it's continuing to copy more data is that it is deleting older data which
would explain when we're writing to it the high speed low speed because it's
not like there's any caching or anything so it's got to be deleting stuff in the
background scamazon what about this 16 terabyte
drive though at 100 bucks there is no
way that this is real when you consider that a brand name eight terabyte
internal drive will cost more than 10 times this price for a 16 terabyte drive
so we're not going to waste time pretending this one could be real we're just going to skip to cracking it open
oh shoot
and nothing of value was lost oh this one's got a purple USB 2 cable cute
surprise surprise it's the exact same oh no it's not the exact
same drives oh what did the did the
Chinese scammers rip off the other Chinese scammers I'm serious it looks
like one of these molds is a rip-off of the other one because this one has these
these lines from the mold here in the exact same oval shape as this one but
then this one has marks from the tool pass and this one doesn't I can't tell
who's ripping off who I can tell that they both ripped off me uh this one just
has a Micro SD card in it once again cheap controller a little bit of nand
Flash and uh hot glue to the rescue again to keep everything in place I'm
not aware of a 16 terabyte SD card but who knows maybe they have some amazing
secret technology there that I've never heard of before 64 gigs again
wait why am I laughing I just spent a hundred dollars on a 64 gig SD card
that's not funny that sucks while I and
you have the technical knowledge to be wary of stuff like this and have the
know-how to verify a product's functionality within that all-important
return window it's easy to imagine that many buyers will inspect their item for
obvious damage then go back to binging Netflix or whatever they were doing
until they get around to really using it sometime later and that's not dumb it's
not unreasonable to expect that you can trust that a product is what you
actually ordered I mean consider this Raphael junf the proud owner of Three
anti-barking Dog deterrents all purchased on the same day gave it five
stars and there's even International praise Amazon customer says she loves
the blue cube eggs so much wait a second
bags this review is about a completely
different category of product even though on first glance the product page
for this thing seems perfectly legit what you're looking at here is the Wombo
Combo of Amazon scammer tactics the
first is one that you're almost certainly familiar with fake reviews can
be created on mass by either Bots or humans and especially with recent
developments in large language models like chat GPT they can be difficult to
detect with 100 accuracy that explains just listing is great or whatever but it
doesn't explain how that tote bag review ended up there Ah that's something
different that was added to the product page using a process called review
merging basically the seller takes an old listing of an actual product and
then abuses their ability to edit that listing by changing literally everything
about it but leaving the reviews in place this makes the product appear to
have been sold to real customers and reviewed well by the aforementioned real
customers while being much less expensive than paying real people to sit
and write reviews and much are order to detect than simple bot generated reviews
and it has the added benefit of boosting search rankings let's say they started
with a product from a super high volume category like socks for example then
they take that sock and they convert it to a portable SSD all of a sudden it's
on the best seller list and then a quick ad spend later it's in the sponsored
posts and boy does Amazon ever make an effort to mix sponsored placements in
with regular ones now of course you're probably thinking at this point all that
sounds like a pretty short-term Play Can't Amazon just block the product and
refuse to issue their payment when the negative reports roll in in theory yes
but think about how that might work while some people will use the thing
right away figure out its crap with an SD card in it and report back they are
likely to be a very small percentage of the kind of people who would order
something like this people who are not that technical in the first place right
and so these companies knowing that
they're dealing with a more mainstream user can use a number of strategies to
stall this process first they can engineer firmware hacks
that will report different specs than the actual Hardware kind of like what we
saw with the misreported capacity here and with the fake GPU scams that we've
investigated in the past this will dramatically delay the time between
customers receiving the item and figuring out that it's bunk and all
their data is actually gone they can also Gaslight you you have a bad cable
did you try updating your drivers they can easily string someone along for a
week or more with useless troubleshooting steps and it's even
possible that deep enough into that process the customer will end up
deciding screw it maybe this is just too complicated for me it was 20 bucks I
don't care that much another thing to consider is that even for a completely
non-functioning product most people don't go straight for a negative public
review I mean I'm pretty understanding stuff happens right so it makes sense
that you would contact the seller for a replacement but at that point well they
can just lie and say oh I'm so sorry you've got a deal away one that was the
wrong capacity uh uh let us replace that for you I mean most people aren't going
to think to open up the chassis Google a part number on the nand package and
figure out exactly what this is especially if doing that could
compromise their ability to get a warranty replacement or a refund they
can also try to buy you off by compensating one user for changing their
review to five stars they might be able to keep their listing up long enough to
scam another 5 or 50 or 500 people and
then finally once those negative reports do finally start to pile up they can
appeal them all of this is in service of keeping those listings up and looking
legitimate for as long as possible or at
least long enough to get their bi-weekly payout from Amazon so yes Amazon could
just not pay them but if they were to
reduce the frequency of their payouts or if they started overzealously
withholding payouts from legitimate sellers the damage to their brand could
be catastrophic the solution to that then is to just garnish anything that
the seller owes from the next payout but if that seller is banned then there
isn't going to be another payout and any customer refunds at that point are going
to come out of Amazon's pocket unless again they want catastrophic damage to
their brand by letting the customer foot the bill of course there is another
option fraud is by its very definition illegal literally everywhere on Earth so
why doesn't Amazon just take legal action against these companies and get
their money back this might seem off topic but stick with me here have you
ever wondered what's up with the Rando names that Chinese companies use to
Brand their Wares I mean do they not have Google Translate to come up with
something coherent actually no but surely they do have a dictionary right
yes but here's the thing if you want to
sell on Amazon you need to have a trademark and using real pronounceable
words greatly increases the odds of somebody else having already trademarked
your name even if it is something stupid like dong swipe so if your business
model then involves scamming people and inevitably being reported and banned
from the platform then you're going to need a lot of trademarks so you make
gibberish names like govindaven or detective then when you get banned you
just change a single letter file a new trademark and boom you're back in scans
I mean business and these businesses are
I'll call them operations are constantly spinning up new shell companies in order
to obfuscate business Partnerships move funds and to dodge responsibility here's
a great example Nai I has been caught with their pants down here or well at
least their vendor has look at all these generic listings that are just waiting
to be filled in by their seller if
yeah that doesn't sound like a burner account not even a little back to the
idea then of getting money back from these guys even if China's legal system
was fair and transparent and respected the right foreign entities
cost of going after hundreds or
thousands of these individually small scale scammers that have completely
disappeared Into The Ether would almost certainly be greater than the return so
it seems that Amazon has made the decision that the cost of compensating
the victims of these scams is lower than the cost of preventing them in the first
place even if that means their entire shopping platform turns into a hellscape
well sort of they apparently did spend 400 million dollars in 2019 combating
spam and scams but there are just practical limits to what you can do I
mean take the review merging exploit for example I mean sure they could just
restrict everyone's ability to edit their product pages but if they did that
then legitimate sellers would struggle to correct errors or ensure that their
Pages accurately reflect any small product revisions like say for example a
new color that's available by the way in the US through the YouTube player itself
so go check that out I mean that's just one exam sample of a legitimate reason
that product ratings and reviews should survive a page edit it's the same grade
insulated water bottle just in a new fun white and red color scheme right or like
what if you had a USB 3 product and all of a sudden you needed to change it to
reflect the new USB 3.2 gen 1 nomenclature
so I don't have the solution other than to remember the old adage if it seems
too good to be true it might just be a good deal but it also might be a scam
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10 off today if you guys enjoyed this video maybe go check out the fake gpus
one they really did put an incredible amount of work into making those things
seem real but they're not