SCAM! - Amazon refunded me.
My Experience with a Fake 16TB Hard Drive and How Scammers Pull It Off
Recently, I had an interesting—and frustrating—experience with a supposed “16TB External Hard Drive” I bought online. I was excited about getting such a massive storage device for $100, but after a few months of use, I discovered that something wasn’t right. When I tried to add more files, the drive stopped working properly, and my data started to corrupt. That’s when I realized I had been scammed. The drive wasn’t 16TB at all—it was actually a tiny 64GB disguised to trick my system into believing it had much more storage.
After digging into what was going on, I learned how these scammers fooled me—and many others—by manipulating the hard drive's firmware and boot sector to display false information. Here’s a breakdown of how it likely happened:
How They Did It
Firmware Tampering: The firmware on storage devices controls how they interact with your computer. Scammers often tamper with the firmware to report false storage capacity to the operating system. In my case, the firmware was modified to tell Windows that the drive had 16TB of storage, when in reality, it was just 64GB. My computer trusted the drive’s firmware, showing the fake 16TB size even though it wasn’t physically there.
Boot Sector Manipulation: The boot sector is the first part of the hard drive that the computer reads when it boots up. A few lines of assembly code or a lightweight program injected into this sector can fool the operating system into reporting incorrect storage details. This is how scammers can "lie" to your computer, making it think it has way more space than it actually does.
Partition Table Editing: Another trick they use is editing the partition table (where your OS gets info about how the storage is divided). By modifying this data, they make the drive appear to have large storage spaces even though it can’t physically store that much. This can cause file corruption once the actual storage limit is exceeded because the OS believes there’s more space than there really is.
Virtual Storage Reporting: The drive can simulate a large amount of virtual storage, but after a certain point, it starts overwriting old data or causing file errors. This is essentially what happened with my drive—once I went beyond its actual 64GB capacity, my files began to corrupt and fail to save properly.
The Result
After realizing what happened, I contacted Amazon and managed to get my $109 refunded (thankfully). But this experience serves as a reminder that scammers can be clever with their tricks, and it’s important to be cautious when purchasing storage devices online, especially if the deal seems too good to be true.
What You Can Do to Protect Yourself
Verify Your Storage: Before trusting a new drive, use reliable software like H2testw or F3 to test the true capacity of the device. These programs will write data to the drive and confirm if it really has the space it claims.
Buy from Reputable Sellers: Stick to buying storage from trusted sellers and brands. If a price for a high-capacity drive seems unusually low, it’s likely too good to be true.
Pay Attention to Reviews: Check customer reviews carefully, especially if other users report similar issues with fake capacities. Scammers often flood listings with fake positive reviews, but genuine negative ones will usually give you the real story.
This whole ordeal has been an eye-opener for me. In today’s tech world, scammers are always finding new ways to manipulate devices and cheat people out of their hard-earned money. My advice: always double-check and never trust suspiciously cheap "too-good-to-be-true" deals on high-capacity storage devices.
H2testw and F3 are tools designed to test the actual capacity of storage devices, like USB drives, SD cards, and external hard drives. They help you verify if the storage size being reported by the device is real or if it’s been manipulated, as in cases of fake storage devices like the one you experienced.
H2testw: This is a Windows-based software that writes data to your storage device and then reads it back to confirm the actual capacity. If the drive has been tampered with, it will detect inconsistencies when reading the data back, revealing the true size of the storage.
F3 (Fight Flash Fraud): This is a tool similar to H2testw, but it's designed for Linux and macOS users. F3 also writes and reads data to test the real capacity of storage devices, and it helps identify fake drives by exposing the true amount of usable space.
Both tools are helpful for checking whether the storage you paid for is what you're actually getting. They’re essential if you want to avoid getting scammed by devices that falsely report their capacity.
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