Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

https://kurtisknodel.com/blog/1Z7fBnGTIlOklNRJ0_nDXnANHcPRYSmRyakATw6lDts

by Arch485 • 4 years ago

339 237 4 years ago

Arch4852• 4 years ago

Are there any good alternatives to Amazon that don't prominently feature fake products?

Depends on what you are looking for. I've never had any problems with BH Photo Video for technology products. Everything else I mostly get directly from the manufacturer website.

derefr5• 4 years ago

To me, the distinguishing feature of Amazon, is that it's an online "everything store" with a yearly subscription that makes delivery of most products free. Any alternatives that try to "be Amazon" in this sense, while 1. only carrying first-party listings, and 2. not commingling stock? Or, in other words: any stores that attempt to be the Amazon of ~2010, rather than the Amazon of 2022?

kurthr• 4 years ago

I second going the manufacturer for anything you really care about.

Western Digital and Samsung definitely have their own web sales on their .com domain.

wombat-man3• 4 years ago

For electronics I've been reasonably happy with Best Buy. Plus you can do store pickup if you need it ASAP. Most stuff ships free in my experience.

llanowarelves2• 4 years ago

Seconded.

I sometimes buy Samsung storage from Samsung directly (they have an online store), and same for Western Digital, but when I'm not doing that I like Best Buy (for general consumer electronics).

For more specialist stuff (pro audio, etc) there's other stores.

fmajid6• 4 years ago

B&H Photo, Adorama, Target, Dell.com, direct from the manufacturer

dehrmann2• 4 years ago

Just filter by seller.

kube-system• 4 years ago

Doesn’t work when FBA inventory is commingled.

prepend2• 4 years ago

I’ve had good success with Walmart. The prices are usually the same and they have free shipping over $35.

Xenoamorphous• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381

datalopers• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381

Walmart is garbage for the same reason as Amazon. Unmoderated third-party sellers.

c0nducktr• 4 years ago

I've seen people recommend eBay over Amazon lately, because the sellers actually have to manage their reputation.

actually_a_dog3• 4 years ago

You could try the FakeSpot extension.

https://www.fakespot.com/extension-vs-analyzer

herbst3• 4 years ago

AliExpress. All the producers are there anyway, if you buy from the official stores you don't get fakes.

Much easier to not get scammed than Amazon with all those resellers with their fake reviews and endless ad budgets.

And if you got lied to you get your money back usually without even sending the item back. Customer service is top notch.

microtherion3• 4 years ago

Exactly. Shipping is considerably slower than with Amazon, but customer service is no-nonsense, and there are never problems with commingled inventory. Even if you don't buy from official stores, you can take your chances with another store. If they scam you, get a refund. If the product is good, keep ordering from them.

bombcar5• 4 years ago

Target, Best Buy, McMaster Carr, Home Depot. All have free or cheap shipping.

Walmart somewhat if you search store or shipped and sold by Walmart.

chrismcb• 4 years ago

Attorney generals need to investigate stuff like this

atlbeer• 4 years ago

Attorneys General

locusofself• 4 years ago

God damnit can they just came it to General Attorneys or something I hate this one.

mkoryak• 4 years ago

Also generals who have switched careers and became attorney generals

bardan• 4 years ago

Like "maidens fair"

LeoPanthera2• 4 years ago

If you still want to buy from Amazon, I often use diskprices.com (no affiliation, just a user) to sort disks on Amazon by price-per-GB.

For example, here are USB flash drives sorted by price-per-GB: https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=u...

logifail2• 4 years ago

While it's a mildly useful site, all diskprices' links are affiliate links, and I've not found an opt-out.

I don't think we should share that stuff here on HN, it's a cancer on the web.

hervature• 4 years ago

You don't think someone providing a free service should receive compensation? I would gladly give them their cut for a useful service. This isn't some shady website writing bogus blogposts or best of listicles.

actually_a_dog3• 4 years ago

Would you rather they make money on ads instead?

LeoPanthera2• 4 years ago

Affiliate links cost me nothing and if it keeps the site in business I am more than happy for them to take a few cents from Amazon.

dpacmittal• 4 years ago

Why is it cancer? I don't see them spamming their affiliate links anywhere. They're providing a useful service and in return they get a commission from Amazon, it's not like I'm paying the extra from my own pocket

NavinF3• 4 years ago

Disagreed. diskprices.com is a well known and invaluable resource in direct contrast to the "Best hard drives of 2022" affiliate spam that'll show up if you search for a website that does what they do.

Affiliate links are indeed cancer, but that battle was lost years ago. Even reputable reviewers use affiliate links today.

spoonjim• 4 years ago

PCPartPicker also uses affiliate links and it's probably the single most useful site I use.

codingdave• 4 years ago

Affiliate programs are one of the few win-win monetization strategies online. Sure, it gets abused by blogspam. I don't want to minimize that abuse because it does suck. But when you look at the good affiliates, someone who truly offers valuable advice that can help you find what you need to buy, and gets a few pennies for it... is that not exactly the type of paid content that we want from the internet?

sandreas2• 4 years ago

While also affiliate, I prefer https://usb.userbenchmark.com, where you can also see ratings for performance and durability and a VALUE (price/quality)

I hate having a cheap, big usb drive that is slow as hell and breaks after 6 months.

Unfortunately, even the good rated ones are not always the same product. Recently I bought 2 Sandisk Ultra Flair USB3 (best price point / quality by far) and they both broke after 3 days of use - after looking it up it was revision 3.2 or something. Older revisions in my pocket still work very fast and reliable.

I would pay for a service that does HONEST reviews without affiliation :-)

notRobot2• 4 years ago

This is what LTT Labs from Linus Tech Tips is trying to do, they're in initial set up stages but moving impressively fast, and I'm super excited for it.

jquery• 4 years ago

Not paying obviously scam prices somewhat mitigates this, although not completely. I still managed to find out the hard way my 1 year old Amazon-bought micro sd card did not have 1tb of storage, despite costing around ~$150-200 which was the market price at the time.

Now I run a full suite of tests on every storage device I get from Amazon (or anywhere else, for that matter).

propagandist• 4 years ago

The quality of listings on Amazon has nose-dived. It used to be a reputable corner of the web. Today it's filled with scams and low-effort white label crap.

cube00• 4 years ago

People been getting boxes of rocks instead of DSLRs for a while now.

mkhpalm• 4 years ago

I got a couple LA area law office coasters in my Sonos box.

noncoml2• 4 years ago

In the future if you want to avoid counterfeit/scams try: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/

neilv2• 4 years ago

When I was learning photojournalism, I loved B&H service and prices so much.

I've recently started adding B&H to where I shop for electronics, alongside Amazon and a local brick&mortar (Microcenter). I no longer check Newegg much, though recently they did have the best price on a particular 1U chassis that I wanted. I'd welcome more direct-to-consumer sales from the brands themselves.

I hate buying USB or SD flash devices, because of all the counterfeits of brand names, and I'll never buy one of those spammy-semirandom-named products.

noncoml2• 4 years ago

Probably you know that already but you can buy Sandisk SDs straight from the Western Digital website (they bought Sandisk sometime back).

Tried them a couple of times and delivery was prompt and free! Highly recommend it.

themadturk• 4 years ago

I took a chance a couple of years ago and got a 500GB dual USB-A/C flash drive with the brand name "Thalar" from Amazon. It's not fast, but it has been utterly reliable. But you never know -- some brands just seem fishier than others.

JamesAdir• 4 years ago

+1 for B&H for top notch service and super helpful staff both online and onsite.

fmajid6• 4 years ago

Also their search doesn’t consider my search keywords as mere suggestions to be ignored (e.g. returning flash drives of all random sizes if you search for “usb flash drive 128gb”), and in many categories they have specific filtering dimensions, e.g. for flash drive they will have one filtering dimension that is USB-C vs USB-A vs Lightning. Amazon’s UI is complete garbage in comparison

agolio• 4 years ago

Seems to be a bug in this page FYI, may have to do with the fact I am trying to access from Germany https://i.imgur.com/5C8Kgq4.png

Jamie9912• 4 years ago

The certificate served to me was valid until December 2022

herpderperator• 4 years ago

Same, but Chrome still didn't want to show the page and said the date was invalid...

Safari is doing the same: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rupu0y3wswxs2l2/validbutinvalid.pn...

hutattedonmyarm• 4 years ago

Working for me (iOS Safari, also from Germany)

mnw21cam• 4 years ago

I just get a blank white page, viewing from UK. This might have something to do with the fact that the web page doesn't actually have any content in the HTML file, and even if it did, the CSS file has "display: block" so one wouldn't be able to see it.

dtgriscom• 4 years ago

Same from USA (Massachusetts). Also got a "Not Secure" warning from Chrome. I assume it's the hug'o'death.

hacym• 4 years ago

Sponsored by Amazon are literal ads, unless you’re referring to “Amazon’s Choice” which is more or less Amazon saying what the “highest rated” item is. Sounds like you clicked an ad.

imwillofficial2• 4 years ago

Anazon promotes that wording because it increases engagement. Does it demonstrate customer obsession to not vet these products at all?

danpalmer• 4 years ago

Allowing someone to push products up the ranking is implicit support for those products, whether it’s an ad or not. Amazon know they’ll be bought more and are ok with that.

This is why advertising on the web, social media platforms, etc, has a bunch of stuff you can and can’t do. Scam products are harder to police there and definitely happen, but a product in a web page or next to a tweet is less risky than a product in a list of products where they user has intention to buy one.

Amazon need to tread really carefully here. I know so many people who avoid eBay because of scams, it pretty much destroyed their reputation in the late 2000s, and Amazon is headed that way.

esses• 4 years ago

I think there's one thing that should be clarified from the article. "Sponsored" does not mean that the product is "sponsored by Amazon" as italicized in the article. It means the seller paid money to be at the top of the search query.

Perhaps it is a healthy dose of old aged jadedness, but I have a habit of trying to avoid Sponsored items.

NavinF3• 4 years ago

uBlock Origin blocks sponsored search results by default because like you said they're just ads.

(Amazon will still return a duplicate result for the same product in the correct place further down the list so you're not missing out on anything by blocking sponsored search results)

atoav• 4 years ago

So yet another instance where using an adblocker can make you safer than not using one.

notRobot2• 4 years ago

Man I love uBO so fucking much.

eyelidlessness5• 4 years ago

It absolutely implies some amount of endorsement. It’s the same as seeing the endcap of a supermarket aisle. They decide to co-market the product and they decide to promote each other in the process. If anything, it’s advertisers on Amazon who have little choice in the arrangement because there are so few alternatives to market themselves in.

makeitdouble• 4 years ago

The issue I'm having more and more is legit brands also paying for better placement as it just makes business sense.

It's kinda similar to apps paying to appear on their own search results' pages in the AppStore, to avoid having competitors take the spot.

Maxburn• 4 years ago

I once followed a sponsored ad for some Samsung headphones. After having problems with that Samsung product support informed me I have no warranty because the product I had was a European model and I’d have to ship them from the US to a European support center to get them fixed.

Amazon took the return/refund almost a year after the sale. Ideal? No, but they took care of it.

Samsung paid for that ad.

fmajid6• 4 years ago

Fun fact: Amazon is the 3rd largest ad company after Google and Meta/Facebook, $32B a year in revenues that are near pure profit. I suspect the market cap of their advertising business would eclipse that of thei e-commerce side if it were reported separately.

RobertRies2• 4 years ago

While I agree this is a problem - one which I have been the victim of as well - Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges. This, of course, is not a great consolidation, especially for a novice who doesn't understand or encounters it too late. But I strongly disagree with "Amazon runs little to no risk selling the fraudulent products, but still makes money off of them." In the next paragraph the author outlines how they've lost trust in Amazon and will not be buying electronics. Erosion of trust is absolutely a massive risk, and one that eBay is also arguably pretty publicly recovering from. I suspect Amazon would prefer not to have fake drives and the costs associated with returns and erosion of trust for the infinitesimal rounding error that makes up the extra revenue they get from fake $20 thumb drives. I'm far from an Amazon fanboy, but I think the problem is more complex than Amazon turning a blind eye because they're making $10k extra profit a year from phony thumb drives. As an outsider, it seems like a difficult tradeoff of not creating incredible hurdles to list products, versus counterfeits getting through.

In my case, the phony thumb drive I bought was delisted before I got home from the walk to the mailbox, literally.

josephcsible• 4 years ago

Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges

But remember that Amazon keeps what's basically a social credit score on you that drops every time you return something, and then they permanently ban you (including from non-retail things like AWS and Prime Video) if it ever gets too low.

anu7df• 4 years ago

I did not know the consequences were so draconian. However, I would imagine returning faulty or fake products will not trigger a score decrease.

thatwasunusual• 4 years ago

Also, it's extra work involved in returning something that shouldn't have been delivered in the first place. Just a waste of time, resources, and what not.

blackoil• 4 years ago

including from non-retail things like AWS

is there any example of this?

fasthands95• 4 years ago

For my DIY hobby I buy a ton of stuff off Amazon - usually small parts under $15 dollars. I just checked and this year I've made 602 total purchases and, after checking the return e-mails they send, I've made 287 returns this year. I just click "bought by mistake each time".

If there is a social credit score based on number of returned items I still haven't hit it.

teamspirit• 4 years ago

I have always wondered about this. I buy and return a lot from Amazon. Do you have any further information? I've always looked to see but have never found anything myself.

Anecdotally, twice after periods of large purchases and high dollar amount of returns (because I was buying a lot of equipment and sometimes had to buy several of the same due to them coming faulty), I noticed same-day and next day shipping would disappear for a few months. I was never able to conclusively determine what the reason was though.

dkjaudyeqooe• 4 years ago

Amazon tracks your returns, but if you're within their model, which is not particularly tight, you don't have anything to worry about.

It's mostly targeted toward people who are egregious, and more importantly, lose Amazon money.

If you return a few too many DSLRs, Apple laptops or other high end gear you'll quickly find yourself on the rocks, or decide you're going to start a drop-shipping business from your Prime account or maybe you regularly put bricks in your returns instead of the actual products.

By comparison there is my friend. She shops a lot on Amazon but not a huge amount, maybe 15 items or so a month on average. She returns a lot of items, at least 20%, sometimes 50% or 100%. Far from banning her she routinely gets courtesy credits and outside policy refunds to keep her happy.

This is after she had actually been banned by Amazon, but not by retail. Instead, she spent 2+ years returning every since book she purchased for her Kindle, well over 100, when she realized she could buy a book and immediately return it, but turn off the Kindle internet connection while she finished reading it, before it was removed. They banned her from ever doing another Kindle return but she otherwise uses her Kindle normally.

dymk• 4 years ago

That’s called fraud prevention

monkeydust• 4 years ago

Is there a way to get this score under GDPR?

amelius2• 4 years ago

Yeah banning your customers seems like a great strategy /s

Ephil012• 4 years ago

This is true for obvious scams (e.g. a blender that breaks in a week). However, for subtle scams people often don't realize the scam. For instance, many people won't hit the actual size limit of the USB and won't realize it's not 1TB. In these cases, Amazon does not take a reputation hit for these individuals due to them being unaware of the scam. Only the technically inclined or those who research before buying will realize the scam and think less of Amazon.

gizmo686• 4 years ago

A typical user might not recognize the nature of the scam. But they very easily could realize that the drive they bought from Amazon is defective. 8GB is not that much space (particularly when the OS thinks it has 1TB to play with). When the firmware runs out of real space to play with, it needs to start dropping data, and that is very visible.

RobertRies2• 4 years ago

No one is arguing the scam isn't insidious and inherently difficult to detect for possibly even most customers. The argument is that Amazon is complicit because they're banking off those sweet counterfeit thumb drive profits, and that there's little risk to Amazon.

I'm suggesting there is a significant risk, and anyone reasonable at Amazon would account for it. There's enough users (tech savvy, or heavy researchers as you point out, and ultimately some portion of casual customers) who will have a negative experience and potentially be skeptical of all purchases - major or minor. Amazon will certainly incur reputational and real return/handling costs.

It seems fairly implausible to me that Amazon would make the decision to say "Yeah, while tech savvy and discerning customers, and some portion of casual users will discover the scam, we just make so much money from fake thumb drives that it's worth it to destroy our reputation with that subset since a significant portion may not notice or ultimately associate Amazon with selling low quality products." All while we see the listings for these items get removed nearly as quickly as the pop up. Doesn't add up.

herbst3• 4 years ago

90% of Amazon.de is AliExpress with a 200-300% margin. I don't know about the other Amazons but it's definitely not only thumb drives.

kennend35• 4 years ago

This is the main reason i stopped using Amazon around 2 years ago and cancelled my prime.

Why not just go to the source (aliexpress) and save the large margin in exchange for a longer wait time?

Sakos2• 4 years ago

It has become quite awful. I was looking for gloves the other week and I ended up buying them at Decathlon because the selection at Amazon was so terrible and untrustworthy.

mosselman• 4 years ago

The real Amazon and other nature is who pays the real bill of this in the costs to nature in terms of transportation impact and pure waste of this crap being created and thrown away.

So yes, you might get your $20 back, but who will restore the cost to nature?

rendaw2• 4 years ago

It's hard to say they don't like it when they're not doing _anything_ visible to combat it.

Filter by country of seller? No. Filter by history/longevity of brand? No. Sort by recency of good reviews, or reviews since the last product change? No. Brand reputation, or per-brand reviews? No. Actual brand/seller contact information in the country you reside? No. Do they even require brands have company registration in the country, or are these total phantom stores?

So "it's difficult" for them but at the same time they've done nothing...

PeterStuer• 4 years ago

Amazon does SKU aggregation in their warehouses for all the sellers that use Amazon fulfillment. Every delivery of that SKU, by whomever, gets thrown into the same pile from witch they pick whenever someone orders said SKU through whoever is selling that stuff on Amazon.

This means that the product you receive from seller X was probably not delivered to the warehouse by seller X, but would be part of a batch delivered by any other seller that uses Amazon fulfillment for that SKU.

This makes it impossible for them to punish the seller whenever a fake or defective product turns up for you if they had no detected it before it got into the pool.

jbullock352• 4 years ago

This comment seems too critical. As a practical matter, Amazon has made it extremely easy to avoid these scams.

Restrict your search to USB drives that not only "Ship from" Amazon but that are "sold by" Amazon. In doing so, you will be weeding out all of the fraudulent devices that the article describes.

goodpoint2• 4 years ago

Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges

No, this is true only in some countries. If there's no amazon store in your country you are in trouble.

prvit2• 4 years ago

I’ve had no issues with Amazon returns/refunds in multiple countries without their own Amazon store.

ohgodplsno• 4 years ago

Nope. Most of the times, they're going to tell you to return it at your own costs to <random city in China>, so pay 50€ for your product that's worth 50€. The sellers lie on where they're located, pretend they're in Germany, you receive the wrong product, and you're shit out of luck. They close their account, reopen one and keep dropshipping.

All the while Amazon happily deletes bad reviews and pockets money.

lreeves• 4 years ago

The reason these drives bother with firmware that makes them look larger to the operating system is so that people buy them and don't notice it was a scam until after the return ratio.

Also I don't know what the internal politics are like at Amazon but it is inexplicable that these listings are present and top of the results for probably a year by my reckoning - fake drives are easily spotted by anyone who knows what current drive sizes and form factors are and in theory it there should be some friction to making a selling account so that you can't just keep re-listing the same fake products under infinite new names. Though that seems to be exactly what's happening.

Also bonus points, if it's a third party seller in my recent experience Amazon literally does not let me report a product as fake, only request refunds and replacements from said seller. When I finally used a LinkedIn contact to reach out to Amazon they told me to create a marketplace seller account to report copyright infringement - but that's only if I own the copyright lol.

Kalium• 4 years ago

I would bet there's a series of seller-facing teams focused on making sure there's as little friction as possible to on-boarding and selling on Amazon.

frognumber• 4 years ago

I don't find returns to be helpful at all.

- If I buy medicine, and it's fake, that's a serious problem.

- If I buy a bottle of vanilla, and it's tainted, that's a serious problem.

- If I buy a piece of electronics, and it's a piece which was returned for working intermittently, that's a problem too.

- If I buy clothing from brands I trust, and I get a knock-off which falls apart in 6 months, that's a problem.

Unless Amazon can get supply chain issues under control, it's too risky to buy most of the stuff I used to buy there. I find eBay and Aliexpress to be more reliable, probably due to reviews sticking to sellers.

I think it's a matter of time before someone starts selling ransomware on Amazon. You plug in a device, and your computer is compromised. The device is a buck cheaper.

RDaneel0livaw• 4 years ago

Because of all these reasons I have stopped purchasing almost anything at all on amazon. Also, it's been like this for YEARS, they clearly don't have any interest at all in fixing it. They make more money the way it is. Nowadays, I try mostly just to buy direct from the company selling the product. Usually the cost is the same. It's slower, yes, and returns are more difficult, yes, but at least I know I'm getting the actual product and not a cheap ripoff that'll either fall apart or poison me.

YurgenJurgensen2• 4 years ago

And the great thing about an Amazon ransomware attack is that if your implant waits long enough to trigger, you can probably get the customer to return the device to Amazon where they'll dutifully stock it back in their warehouse ready for another victim. So efficient.

thathndude• 4 years ago

They need to stop commingling FBA goods. Full stop. It’s a smart, efficient idea in a world of good-faith actors. Not in a world of scammers and knock offs

orev• 4 years ago

The issue is that Amazon is not incurring the costs that other retailers do to try to prevent these issues, so they can keep prices low and seemingly sustain their fast shipping model while their competitors who are trying to do something about it lose out on business. Eventually those competitors are forced out of business, or have to reduce themselves to the same lack of controls and everybody loses.

Viewed on that way, there’s actually consumer harm, and maybe there’s an opening for an anti-trust case (which in the US requires proof of consumer harm).

hitpointdrew• 4 years ago

. I suspect Amazon would prefer not to have fake drives and the costs associated with returns

I am not so sure about that. I think it’s a calculated risk, how many people will actually put in the time and effort to return the product and how many will just not care enough to go through the return process and just eat the cost.

vineyardmike• 4 years ago

they've lost trust in Amazon and will not be buying electronics. Erosion of trust is absolutely a massive risk

They should do something about it if they care. They’re turning into a flea market and it seems their business plan (which doesn’t matter because AWS makes all the money) is to run out the clock and hope they put everyone out of business first.

They should stop allowing listing changes that completely change the product. They should allow specific vendors (probably at some cost) evade the SKU binning that co-mingles counterfeits with genuine products.

Fuck, they should issue a statement acknowledging the problem and tell us they’re trying to fix it before we abandon them.

That said, I had to buy an SD card recently and with all these scam products I went with the Amazon basics version since they’re the only seller of AB. Funny how that works…

matheweis2• 4 years ago

A related problem I’ve encountered on Amazon is wrong quantity of items; ex, order three 8 packs and instead get three singles. Their return policy doesn’t have the ability to correct for this as far as I’ve been able to find.

mwint• 4 years ago

Isn’t that just “I got the wrong item”? The “item” you ordered was “8-pack of widgets”, you got “1-pack of widgets”, so it’s the wrong item.

matheweis2• 4 years ago

Nope, tried that, they let me return the “1-pack widgets” but sent another “1-pack widgets”

cfeduke• 4 years ago

I've encountered this problem with superglue. I thought I'd be clever and setup a monthly subscribe and save and I ended up having to send back a single tube twice - the first time a single replacement tube was sent back to me, and the second time I received a credit and they cancelled the subscribe and save. It's basically impossible to get through their automated returns system to get the desired result - that is, receiving what you've already paid for.

Years ago, a similar situation would result in a "keep the item we sent by mistake, and we'll dispatch the quantity you paid for." This behavior seemed to rely on human support personnel.

AuryGlenz2• 4 years ago

I also bought some toothpaste on Amazon recently and it was the wrong kind. Their return page wouldn’t let me return it for any reason - I needed to get on chat support to get a refund. You’d think “you literally sent me the wrong item” would always be a good reason but apparently not.

fortran77• 4 years ago

I would order things like toothpaste from Walgreens.com or Target.com in the US. Not Amazon!

up2isomorphism2• 4 years ago

You know that price is too slow for 1TB drive and you are willing to take the chance and at the end you can still return it get the refund and give a bad review. I didn’t know how much better Amazon can do as a platform in this case.

imwillofficial2• 4 years ago

But not selling fraudulent products. Are you saying nothing more can be done?

up2isomorphism2• 4 years ago

It can try to reduce the chance, but absolutely no fraudulent products? No, I don’t think so and I don’t think any platform can do that without significantly increasing the cost. I have using a dozen of e commerce websites and no one is doing remotely comparable to Amazon.

Just return the product and write a review to help others rather than whining about something unrealistic didn’t happen.

sandreas2• 4 years ago

Like I describe in https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/01/the-ultimate-boot-stick/, I tend no longer buying USB drives but mini USB single card readers for micro SD. Although not as fast and a bit more expensive, they are reliable, bootable and pretty cheap to "upgrade", as soon as micro SD cards (e.g. Samsung Evo Select - made for amazon and highest probability of "no fake" cards) have sale prices.

I also use the software h2testw to check, if the drive / card is a fake or not as soon as I bought one.

andreapmd• 4 years ago

I noticed this as well recently while I was shopping for an SSD drive. A majority of listings are obvious frauds with no reviews. What I also found out is that there is no way to report a listing for obvious fraud, probably to avoid deliberately flagging competitors’ products, but which could easily done by taking into account an individual customer’s credibility score/reputation/history.

IMSAI8080• 4 years ago

I also tried to report some of these obviously fake 1TB drives about 6 months ago and found it incredibly difficult. I found the fact it was so difficult to report them more frustrating that the fact there were fake listings. I tried going through the hassle of contacting Amazon customer services. There's not option to report bad listings and the Amazon agent doesn't seem to even know what to do about it. Then eventually they say they'll pass it on to the relevant department and weeks later the exact same fake listing is still there.

eyelidlessness5• 4 years ago

I have refused to give Amazon any business of my own for several years because their directly-operated logistics business is morally disgusting to me. Realistically they run many businesses, that’s one of them. Their retail business is little more than branding. Their real business is private infrastructure.

The retail business overall is a scam. Example: I’ve been trying to find a comforter for a while, and I haven’t been happy with some of the options I found because a lot of other ecommerce sites have not great search experiences. I thought, well I can search Amazon for my preferences and buy it elsewhere. Nope, not even a single filter I applied was true for any search results I looked at. Amazon didn’t even try to serve me cotton comforters, much less any other refinements they offered.

They’re in the business of selling business. Whether that’s their logistics connecting suppliers and shipping with sales, or it’s their tech services connecting startups with time shares on a server.

I wouldn’t buy a USB drive or a blanket from IBM either. It’s the same thing.

amelius2• 4 years ago

I wouldn’t buy a USB drive or a blanket from IBM either. It’s the same thing.

Nobody ever got fired for buying a USB drive or a blanket from IBM.

scarface744• 4 years ago

I have refused to give Amazon any business of my own for several years because their directly-operated logistics business is morally disgusting to me. Realistically they run many businesses

So where do you buy your electronics from? Guess how the people who are making those are treated? Or is that okay since they are in another country?

eyelidlessness5• 4 years ago

Nope, it’s not okay and I’ll readily admit I’m a hypocrite. Because, as you imply, there’s no ethical alternative. And I could go on about the ways I try to minimize my impact with electronics too, but that isn’t and wasn’t the point.

I’m not sure what your point is. That I should buy from Amazon because factory workers in other countries are treated poorly? What would that do for those workers?

idontwantthis• 4 years ago

Can anyone tell me if there is a program to verify usb drive size on Mac? F3 requires linux or windows (has instructions for mac but those require running linux in virtualbox).

Edit: nvm, enough of it works natively on mac

bombcar5• 4 years ago

You can do poormans by copying known large files (all your Linux ISOs) and then doing a shasum on source and dest.

Or repeated rsync set to verify each block.

skibble• 4 years ago

There’s a GUI app version here: https://github.com/vrunkel/F3XSwift

jgaa• 4 years ago

Amazon does what's in their own best interest. This year, it looks like scamming is it.

I wrote a 1 star review last month on a scam product (I fell for) with obviously fake reviews (the product was an earplug, the 3000 5-star reviews was totally generic or for womens beauty creams). The review was rejected because it was violating Amazons "policy". The scam product itself and the 3000 fake reviews was fine.

magic_hamster2• 4 years ago

Amazon has not been reliable for a number of years. Even well reviewed products with thousands of reviews, products that are supposed to integrate well ("frequently bought together"), and basically anything not sold directly by Amazon is questionable. The sellers marketplace on Amazon has become unwieldy. I decided to reduce buying on Amazon as much as possible unless it's very low risk items sold by Amazon directly, and even then there might be a chance I'll send it back, because stuff like Amazon Basics has inconsistent quality.

captainmuon• 4 years ago

Who would buy a no-name USB drive from Amazon? Or even from a third-party seller? Stick to a brand like SanDisk and buy directly from Amazon (Prime) and you should be fine.

thih92• 4 years ago

It reminds me of Apple’s broken laptop keyboards that would also stop working after heavy use.

nottorp2• 4 years ago

That's not a scam, it's stupidity.

It would be a scam if half of the keys did nothing from the start.

As it is it's design in California inside an air conditioned and purified office. You're using the laptop wrong if you take it outside ;)

Source: I own one of those unusuable keyboards.

thih92• 4 years ago

You're using the laptop wrong if you take it outside ;)

Same-ish with the USB drives, i.e. "You're using the usb drive wrong if you fill it to the max.". Both devices work for casual use, both look like they could handle more heavy use, both break sooner than expected.

And sure, it's not a serious comparison, but I still see a surprising amount of similarities.

nottorp2• 4 years ago

I just had the pleasure of analyzing a "60 Tb SSD" that a friend bought without asking me.

048d:1234 Integrated Technology Express, Inc. Chipsbank CBM2199 Flash Drive

It's probably a 128 Gb usb stick chip. I didn't open it to see the chips but after copying like 150 Gb of movies to it they started to randomly not open.

It was directly off aliexpress so the proud owner said he'll keep it to copy movies to it for when he goes on holiday. I guess for him it doesn't matter which 8 of 10 movies he watches.

schipplock• 4 years ago

It's really sad what Amazon has turned into :(.

Nowadays I only buy products from brands / companies I know (and I do visit my local electronic stores to buy them). It's really hard to find a brand on Amazon that doesn't sound like its name wasn't generated :).

Regarding these scam listings: I wouldn't buy a usb stick from a brand like "pullheart", "kiknin", "probuk", or "generic" (I'm not making these names up).

Also: the biggest capacity for a usb stick Verbatim or Intenso offer is 256GB (Verbatim) or 512GB (Intenso). These companies have websites with product information.

bombcar5• 4 years ago

Anything that gets infected with “marketplace” drops in quality substantially and quickly. It’s annoying.

possiblydrunk• 4 years ago

Not questioning the post or it's conclusions, but how does Kurtis 'know' that the drives are fake? Is it just the price point? Are there reliable lists to check? Curious as to how to spot fakes.

genericacct• 4 years ago

Forensicguy on tiktok opened one, It was a usb2 Stick inside a metal case

microtherion3• 4 years ago

I've made it a habit to run F3 on any USB drive or SD card I buy. This will establish quite clearly whether the device has the advertised capacity.

Arch4852• 4 years ago

If you sort the reviews on these items by lowest to highest, you'll usually find somebody who actually purchased and tested the item confirming it's a scam.

MarkusWandel• 4 years ago

My trustworthy go-to for electronics is increasingly Costco. This has tempted me before...

https://www.costco.com/sandisk-nvme-1tb-extreme-portable-ssd...

j-bos• 4 years ago

When a store ceases to be reliable, isn't it time to stop shopping there? At least for USBs.

Feels like an inconvenience.

genepope• 4 years ago

Pretty much any tech product top search results on Amazon is a fraud (and it can go VERY deep into the results). I have been burned so many times I finally learned: DO NOT BUY TECH from Amazon! PS: Forget the Amazon Choice as it is mostly just based on how many buy the product so it tends to be self reinforcing, even for a fraud product.

greatgib2• 4 years ago

Lastly Amazon is very bad for shopping.

I used to buy on Amazon when I wanted branded products with insurance. Opposite to buy on AliExpress, ebay, ... For some items.

But there are 2 very big problems:. Amazon mixing the stock of all the sellers selling the same thing. So, when you want something like a USB key or SSD, sdcards, even if the listing and the seller you are looking at looks legit, you don't know where the item will come from, it can easily be fake as it will not necessarily come from the stock of this seller.

Having to send back, be reimbursed, and reorder is not a solution. You loose a lot of time, and energy with stress. Maybe you needed that for a time sensitive usage.

Also, the second issue I noticed is that it is now very hard to find good branded products with Amazon search. It looks like that they are mostly Amazon owned brands or a few sponsored products that show up. But there is not anymore the large choice of products that you would expect. I noticed that when looking for a vacuum cleaner for example!

j1elo• 4 years ago

Amazon mixing the stock of all the sellers selling the same thing. So, when you want something like a USB key or SSD, sdcards, even if the listing and the seller you are looking at looks legit, you don't know where the item will come from, it can easily be fake as it will not necessarily come from the stock of this seller.

Do you have any source for this? This explanation is perfect to explain some friends about why they should be wary of buying electronics from Amazon

dismalpedigree• 4 years ago

All inventory filled by Amazon (almost all prime goods are filled this way) is commingled by sku. This allows amazon to distribute the items across warehouses and give faster delivery times. Problem comes when another seller claims to sell the same item. They send their fake items in marked as the real thing. They get mixed with all the real ones. Now when an order is placed from legitimate seller it can be filled using fake inventory.

greatgib2• 4 years ago

See this for example: https://www.redpoints.com/blog/amazon-commingled-inventory-m...

ssl232• 4 years ago

Also, the second issue I noticed is that it is now very hard to find good branded products with Amazon search.

This. It seems well known brands have almost abandoned Amazon and low end consumer electronics altogether in some categories. A couple weeks ago I wanted to get a mains extension cable (power strip) with USB-C power connector for my phone. There wasn't a single brand I recognised apart from Belkin, who seemed not to sell any with USB-C (only USB3). The brand I opted for ended up being garbage (USB socket loose, general chintzy feel to something that will handle mains voltages and stay powered-on under my bed for years - no thanks).

YurgenJurgensen2• 4 years ago

But at least you know that when your house burns down due to a chinesium power strip, you can return the burnt remains to Amazon for a $20 refund.

qaq• 4 years ago

I switched to Best Buy for a lot of the tech buying

mmastrac• 4 years ago

I refused to buy an SD card for my phone off Amazon, instead paying 1.5X from Best Buy from a non-marketplace seller there. I can't risk buying easily-faked stuff from AMZN any more.

I have to assume that Best Buy isn't commingling marketplace/first-party, however.

pevey• 4 years ago

Agreed. The title of this article could have been, "Top EVERYTHING on Amazon are a Scam." I started buying a lot from Amazon way back when they mostly sold books and CDs. Was a Prime Member for years after that became a thing. But I canceled about a year ago. It's basically AliExpress, which is fine for certain things, but most of my shopping is now done elsewhere. Especially electronics of any sort.

sandworm101• 4 years ago

A terabyte of flash for 20$ ?? The number one song on the charts today is horrible. That "best in class" car is in a class of one. Fools and thier money.

scarface744• 4 years ago

Not only was it top result, it was sponsored by Amazon. (I don't actually know what this means, but it adds some legitimacy to the item and implies that Amazon endorses it).

Maybe the author is not a native English speaker? I saw “sponsored” and immediately knew it was an ad.

This was “Amazon’s Choice”

SanDisk 1TB Extreme PRO USB 3.2 Solid State Flash Drive - SDCZ880-1T00-GAM46 https://a.co/d/2hSvRQx

A product I assume is legitimate

qrck13• 4 years ago

Sold by some CN company via amazon. Do never buy from CN company selling on amazon, it will greatly improve your amazon buyer's satisfaction

Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

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