(ed: Amazon reached out to us saying “Thanks for bringing this to our consideration. We have handed this suggestions alongside to the suitable crew in your behalf. Tell us if in case you have any additional questions or issues”. 16 hours after the preliminary publication of this text, each gadgets – and some extra are nonetheless listed on Amazon.com)

Whereas compiling our record of the perfect Black Friday SSD offers, we got here throughout a peach of a product. 

The Sajiulas “16TB transportable SSD exterior exhausting drive” (their description not ours), a barely plausible storage product that’s at present Amazon’s primary new launch within the extremely aggressive Exterior Strong State Drives class. 

In a nutshell, it claims to be a 16TB exterior SSD formed like a Samsung T5 drive, with a sticker worth of $109.99. To Amazon’s credit score, it comes with free tech assist and is returnable till January 31, 2023, giving the shopper loads of time to seek out out that it’s really not a 16TB drive, not to mention a 16TB stable state drive.

What is the catch?

A real exterior SSD from a acknowledged model (2TB Samsung T7 Protect) sells for $149.99, which is, TB for TB, 10 instances cheaper.

When one thing is just too good to be true, it in all probability is, and we’ve got little doubt that within the case of the Sajiulas 16TB SSD, one thing went very fallacious in Amazon’s filtering system.

To not be outdone, there’s a 5TB “exterior transportable exhausting drive” from an obscure firm referred to as WIOTA that appears suspiciously like Sajiulas’s product and is the primary new launch within the exterior exhausting drive class. 

Each merchandise have attracted lots of of optimistic rankings and declare to have learn write speeds of 500Mbps and 450Mbps respectively. 

A better take a look at the opinions reveals a worrying pattern; plenty of the 5-star ones are for various merchandise. One says, “I ordered a blue & a pink one, my brother beloved his, helps him get a greater grip of the distant since he’s disabled, adore it, thanks” and one other one, “Actually stunned how a lot liquid it holds with out leaking”.

We did not hyperlink to them to keep away from giving them extra publicity.

What’s Amazon doing?

Amazon has been cracking down on counterfeit and faux merchandise forward of Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022. 

The corporate lately revealed that it had seized greater than 240,000 gadgets in China in a single operation, bringing its total whole of merchandise seized and disposed of to greater than three million. Worryingly in 2021, there have been greater than 2.5 million makes an attempt by so-called dangerous actors all over the world to create new promoting accounts.

Regardless, there are nonetheless gaps in Amazon’s anti counterfeiting system that enables operators like Sajiulas and Wiota from promoting bogus merchandise to unsuspected clients. 

TechRadar Professional has reached out to Amazon and can report again ought to we get any reply.