Walmart is just not the one large on-line retailer that’s fighting pretend merchandise on-line. A whole bunch of listings from dozens of distributors on eBay (opens in new tab) and AliExpress (opens in new tab) are presently promoting 64TB and 128TB SSDs at all-time low costs.

The issue is that there aren’t any mainstream 128TB or 64TB SSDs. Samsung demoed a 128TB SSD again in August 2022, whereas Nimbus Information sells a 64TB SSD to enterprise clients solely, however neither will promote for the $30 that fraudulent distributors are asking for. Regardless of this being a transparent case of “too good to be true”, dozens have been stung. 

TechRadar reader Colin M reached out to us final week having bought a 30TB SSD from AliExpress, solely to seek out out that he had been conned.

“It appears the precise drive capability complete is 128GB, which is 2 x 64GB proven as the 2 drives. I attempted copying 250GB+ recordsdata to one of many ‘drives’ and though it gave the impression to be working as regular when it completed, I then clicked on properties to indicate precise GBs,” he defined.

“I think the drive accommodates 2 x 64GB SD playing cards which can be programmed to disguise the SD playing cards as 15TB drives. When the ‘drive’ is being copied to achieve capability, this system simply overwrites recordsdata giving the looks of working appropriately.”

Patrons, beware

Counterfeited merchandise have been an issue for hundreds of years and on-line marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and AliExpress have allowed this subject to change into international, making it far harder to get rid of.

Worryingly, not solely are these drives pretend, they might additionally simply have been contaminated with malware. Earlier this 12 months, hackers mailed out USB flash drives contaminated with ransomware, even together with teddy bears within the bundle.

SSD costs are falling quick with 2TB fashions obtainable for lower than $100, an all time low attributable to a crash in demand and an extra stock. Regardless of this, we wouldn’t count on excessive capability drives (4TB, 8TB or 16TB SSD) to expertise any comparable drop in worth as a result of demand remains to be excessive for these goal markets (enterprise, companies, prosumers).

Amazon appears to have efficiently prevented that rip-off, in all probability as a result of it has stricter controls on sellers from mainland China, though there are others – like pretend 2TB USB flash drives (opens in new tab) or 2TB microSD playing cards (opens in new tab).

TechRadar Professional has reached out to eBay and Aliexpress to seek out out what they’re doing to eradicate pretend product listings and weed out the dodgy distributors forward of the profitable 11.11 Singles Gross sales, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.