You buy a new Seagate high-capacity sealed external hard drive, bring it home - it works great. But as the information fills up, the disc suddenly stops being read and it's not a malfunction.
Photo: Anton Polyakov
There is no limit to the cunning of crooks. They replaced your disk with a small, old and cheap one and changed the service information in it (including model name) and a partition table so that it seems that the disk has the volume indicated on box.
As soon as you write from 80 to 320 GB of information to the disk (depending on which disk the crooks put on), it will stop working.
But how can it be that a disc is sealed with a manufacturer's label and sold in large stores? Everything is very simple.
The crooks buy these discs in stores for cash, replace the discs inside the case, and return the discs to the stores. Some shops do not even require a passport for such a return. And then these discs are sold to unsuspecting buyers (however, the sellers do not suspect anything either).
All these manipulations are carried out only with Seagate drives, and this is no accident: there is a holographic sticker on top of the disc box of this manufacturer, without tearing it, it is supposedly impossible to open the box.
Photo: Anton Polyakov
And the bottom of the box can be easily opened and closed back, so that nothing will be noticeable.
Photo: Anton Polyakov
Today the only external sign of a "fraudulent" disc is the absence of a transparent film on the box, but it is not so difficult to seal the box into a film either.
A note on Habré about a 320GB disk instead of 6TB, purchased from Player.ru: https://habr.com/ru/post/520402/.
A note on Pikabu about the disc purchased from Citylik: https://pikabu.ru/story/podstava_v_sitilinke_5109203 (the scammers just stuffed an old broken disk into the case).
Perhaps I also came across this a couple of years ago: a friend brought an external Seagate 8TB drive, which was defined as 80 GB. Then I thought it was just some kind of malfunction, because the disk model was determined exactly the one that was written on the box.
Now, many sellers have already learned about this scam and are very careful about returning such discs, so it is hoped that fewer people will face this.
© 2020, Alexey Nadezhin
For ten years I have been writing every day about technology, discounts, places of interest and events. Read my blog on the site ammo1.ru, in LJ, Zen, Mirtesen.
My projects:
Lamptest.ru. I test LED lamps and help figure out which ones are good and which are not so good.
Elerus.ru. I collect information about domestic electronic devices for personal use and share it.
You can contact me in Telegram @ ammo1 and by mail [email protected].