- This is obviously fake.
A 16 terabyte SSD
for $110?
Sails
way past to good to be true ville,
clear into, you must have been trying to get Rippedofolis.
Or at least you would think that.
For the average shopper,
it is shockingly easy to run into scam products
on the world's largest e-commerce platform.
Look at this.
A quick search for external SSD yields
(dinging) real, real, real, real,
fake
on the second line.
But come on, Linus, you might say,
"No one would buy a one star rated product from OKQKOK".
Which is fair enough.
But what about these ones with nice prices,
dozens of positive reviews
and Prime shipping?
Fake,
fake,
fake.
And yet
Amazon is somehow allowing these scammers
to not only list their wares,
but to achieve prominent positions in search results.
What's going on over there Jeffy?
You too busy riding in your (censored) rocket
to take care of your customers.
I mean maybe.
But also no.
The process that these companies use to defraud
both unsuspecting shoppers
and Amazon themselves
is surprisingly savvy and
kind of like draconian anti-cheat methods,
cracking down on them
could end up harming the legitimate sellers
more than it harms the bad actors.
Just like it would harm me
to not tell you about our sponsor
- Build Redux,
they make it easy to configure your new build
with support guides to help along the way.
They also offer competitive pricing
as compared to building a PC yourself.
Head to buildredux.com/linus
and start your new build today.
- Let's open up
with a look at our two attempts to play ourselves here.
First up is a two terabyte USB 3.1
portable SSD from Lirxxur
that is $36.99.
From the product page on Amazon,
it says that its features are three inch hard drive
and type C port.
Compare that to the $120 of greedy Western brands
and even if it does lack a loop for a strap
or some ruggedization, it's a no-brainer, right?
For a tech minded audience,
this difference in price would actually be a huge red flag.
But guys, you got to put yourself in the shoes of your uncle
who spends more time de-weeding his garden
than defragging his disks.
I mean, look at this hand trowel,
it's probably not a scam.
A 70% discount might not seem like an obvious problem.
I mean, even in tech there are categories like
cables for example,
where you could easily spend a fifth of the price
if you aren't subsidizing a bloated marketing budget
or paying an influencer tax.
(coughing)
Hey, even at the price, that's a good screwdriver.
Independently verified, I don't want to hear about it.
Lttstore.com.
Let's give this thing a fair shake, right?
What the heck?
This is not a good sign.
(laughing)
I already-
What are these?
It's crap already in ways I couldn't have possibly expected.
It comes with a micro B to USB-A adapter
and a type C to USB-A adapter.
But even though it's color coded blue,
this is in fact a USB 2.0 adapter
because you can see the other five pins aren't in there.
(tapping)
Okay, extruded aluminum case.
I see what you mean about it being difficult
to open this thing up,
this is going to not be easy.
Once again,
USB 3 color coded,
actually USB 2 cable.
- [Adam] Is that actually a standard thing, like the-
- Yes.
- [Adam] That's like
specified by USB standard? - Yeah.
There's some non-standard colors
like Razor does green. - Yeah, I've seen that.
- One Plus does red,
I've seen purple ones,
I've seen yellow ones for like
higher power or whatever.
But blue means USB 3,
in theory.
How suspicious,
these two SSDs from very different brands use
the same elements of their images?
Why are there pictures of hard drives
to represent SSDs?
Does this say it has two SSDs in it?
You know what, we'll get to that one later.
19 megabytes per second reads.
I like it.
Thank goodness it's type C and
M.2, it is not.
(laughing)
High speed you say?
More like
(inhaling)
speed.
I don't think that's making the video.
- [Adam] Is it still running?
- Yeah,
it's just taking absolutely forever
to write the test file to it.
Something is definitely amiss here,
but even though the product page
didn't specify our rated speed when we clicked by,
it's actually been updated since then
to reflect its USB 2-ness.
This product isn't necessarily a scam
yet.
It's just
really slow.
- [Adam] It does take liberal use of the term USB 3.
- Yeah.
Yeah. USB 3
ish.
- [Adam] It supports part of the USB 3.0 standard.
- If you plug it into- - Which is USB 2.
- Yeah, if you plug it into USB 3 port, it will be detected.
Now tell me something, Adam,
do you know the answer to this already,
can I actually play back anything that's on it?
- [Adam] Surprisingly, yeah.
- Really?
- [Adam] Yeah. I couldn't believe it either,
'cause I assumed at first
that it would just be like a 32 gigabyte.
- We've seen that scam before,
where they just play around with the firmware of the device
to make it show a large capacity
but when you actually try to write data to it
it turns out that it's not actually there
and if you try to read it back, it's just
gone.
- [Adam] I mean, go look in the device properties.
- We'll see. We'll see here.
No, 'cause the device properties will report correctly.
Oh my goodness, can we just play this file please?
Here we go.
Oh wow.
It's at a hundred percent use,
playing a video.
- [Adam] It is RED footage.
- You put all RED footage on it?
- [Adam] Because it's four gigabyte increments,
so I could keep loading it. - Adam.
- [Adam] And tell how much it, when it actually would die.
- Gosh darn it Adam.
- [Adam] It was a clever maneuver.
- One of the issues we're running into here
is if they are pulling a capacity scam,
maybe the actual capacity is 128 gigs or 256 gigs,
it would take us forever to fill this thing.
Can I play back this file?
Yes.
Hey look,
it's my baby boy.
(dinging)
(laughing)
Used space, 176 gigs. Okay.
Free space.
Wait, VendorCo?
Yes. Yes.
This is the VendorCo product code USB device.
Just leaving placeholders.
I guess assuming they're running a firmware capacity hack,
it's giving them too much credit.
Oh wow,
it's so slow.
It's like I can actually see it looking for the next
block of NaN.
I don't think I have the patience
to find out if they're running a capacity scam.
Let's just (indistinct). - No (indistinct)
- I don't care.
- [Adam] The fact that it put 170 gigs on it-
- Yeah.
- [Adam] Is like actually makes it not a terrible deal.
What? Like $16 for 128 gigs?
- This drive is copying
at zero bites per second right now Adam.
It's a terrible deal.
It's terrible product.
- [Adam] If you can't handle it at its lowest,
you don't deserve it at its best.
- I need to not stab my hand with this.
Ah!
Okay.
Well things are about to get interesting.
Hey, there we go.
Yep.
That is
a NAND package.
It is actually hot glued
and not screwed to the slip.
(laughing) What?
What appears to be just about the cheapest,
smallest controller I can possibly imagine,
can confirm, this is not wired
for any kind of USB anything other than USB 2.
I'm going to try and peel this glue off
and then we can check the part number of this.
I pretty much promise you
that that is not two terabytes.
We just didn't manage to completely fill it up
because that would take a long time.
Adam, I'm afraid that this may not survive.
- [Adam] Oh no!
- The operation.
Okay, here we go.
Let's see if we can get a part number off this thing.
- [Adam] Zoom in on his face.
- Stop.
Chip name,
no name 2.
Perfect. That's really helpful.
This is apparently a 64 gigabyte chip.
This is the closest match we found.
Whoop. (beeping)
It's almost certainly this from BOLO here,
which would indicate that this is a 64 gigabyte chip.
That means that the way it's continuing to copy more data
is that it is deleting older data,
which would explain when we're writing to it
the high speed, low speed,
'cause it's not like there's any caching or anything,
so it's got to be deleting stuff in the background.
♪ Scamazon. ♪
What about this 16 terabyte drive though.
At a hundred bucks, there is no way that this is real,
when you consider that a brand name
eight terabyte internal drive
will cost more than 10 times this price
for a 16 terabyte drive.
So we're not going to waste time
pretending this one could be real,
we're just going to skip to cracking it open.
Oh shoot.
Ah.
- [Adam] And nothing of value was lost.
- Oh, this one's got a purple USB 2 cable.
Cute. Surprise, surprise, it's
the exact same-
Oh no, it's not the exact same drives.
Oh, what?
Did the Chinese scammers
rip off the other Chinese scammers?
I'm serious.
It looks like one of these molds
is a rip off of the other one,
'cause this one has these lines from the mold here
in the exact same oval shape as this one.
But then this one has marks from the tool pass
and this one doesn't.
I can't tell who's ripping off who.
I can tell that they both ripped off me.
This one just has a micro SD card in it.
Once again,
cheap controller,
little bit of NaN flash and
hot glue to the rescue again to keep everything in place.
I'm not aware of a 16 terabyte SD card, but who knows?
Maybe they have some amazing secret technology there
that I've never heard of before.
64 gigs again. (laughing)
Wait, why am I laughing?
I just spent a hundred dollars on a 64 gig SD card.
That's not funny, that sucks.
While I and you have the technical knowledge
to be wary of stuff like this
and have the know-how to verify a products functionality
within that all important return window,
it's easy to imagine that many buyers will
inspect their item for obvious damage
then go back to binging Netflix or whatever they were doing
until they get around to really using it sometime later.
And
that's
not dumb.
It's not unreasonable to expect
that you can trust that a product
is what you actually ordered.
I mean, consider this,
Raphael Jomphe,
the proud owner of three anti barking dog deterrents,
all purchased on the same day, gave it five stars
and there's even international praise.
Amazon customer says,
"She loves the blue cube bags so much".
Wait a second,
bags?
This review is about
a completely different category of product,
even though on first glance,
the product page for this thing seems perfectly legit.
What you're looking at here is
the Wombo combo of Amazon's scammer tactics.
The first is one that you're almost certainly familiar with,
fake reviews can be created on mass
by either bots or humans
and, especially with recent developments
in large language models like ChatGPT,
they can be difficult to detect with 100% accuracy.
That explains just, "This thing is great", or whatever.
But it doesn't explain
how that tote bag review ended up there.
Ah, that's something different.
That was added to the product page
using a process called review merging.
Basically the seller takes an old listing
of an actual product
and then abuses their ability to edit that listing
by changing literally everything about it
but leaving the reviews in place.
This makes the product
appear to have been sold to real customers
and reviewed well by the aforementioned real customers
while being much less expensive
than paying real people to sit and write reviews
and much harder to detect
than simple bot generated reviews.
And it has the added benefit of boosting search rankings.
Let's say they started with a product
from a super high volume category like
socks,
for example.
Then they take that sock
and they convert it to
a Portable SSD.
All of a sudden it's on the best seller list
and then a quick ad spend later,
it's in the sponsored posts
and boy does Amazon ever make an effort
to mix sponsored placements in with regular ones.
Now of course you're probably thinking at this point,
"All that sounds like a pretty short term play,
can't Amazon just block the product
and refuse to issue their payment
when the negative reports roll in?".
In theory, yes.
But think about how that might work.
While some people will use the thing right away,
figure out it's crap with an SD card in it and report back,
they are likely to be a very small percentage
of the kind of people who would order something like this,
people who are not that technical in the first place,
right?
And so these companies,
knowing that they're dealing with a more mainstream user
can use a number of strategies to stall this process.
First, they can engineer firmware hacks
that will report different specs than the actual hardware.
Kind of like what we saw with the misreported capacity here
and with the fake GPU scams
that we've investigated in the past.
This will dramatically delay the time
between customers receiving the item
and figuring out that it's bunk
and all their data is actually gone.
They can also gaslight you.
"You have a bad cable",
"Did you try updating your drivers?".
They can easily string someone along for a week or more
with useless troubleshooting steps.
And it's even possible that
deep enough into that process,
the customer will end up deciding,
"Screw it. Maybe this is just too complicated for me.
It was 20 bucks. I don't care that much".
Another thing to consider
is that even for a completely non-functioning product,
most people don't go straight for a negative public review.
I mean, I'm pretty understanding, stuff happens, right?
So it makes sense
that you would contact the seller for a replacement.
But at that point, well they can just lie and say,
"Oh I'm so sorry, you got a DOA one,
that was the wrong capacity.
Let us replace that for you".
I mean, most people aren't going to think
to open up the chassis,
Google a part number on the NaN package
and figure out exactly what this is.
Especially if doing that could compromise their ability
to get a warranty replacement or a refund.
They can also try to buy you off
by compensating one user
for changing their review to five stars,
they might be able to keep their listing up long enough
to scam another 5 or 50 or 500 people.
And then finally, once those negative reports
do finally start to pile up,
they can appeal them.
All of this is in service of keeping those listings up
and looking legitimate for as long as possible,
or at least long enough
to get their biweekly payout from Amazon.
So
yes,
Amazon could just not pay them
but if they were to reduce the frequency of their payouts,
or if they started over zealously withholding payouts
from legitimate sellers,
the damage to their brand could be catastrophic.
The solution to that then is to just
garnish anything that the seller owes from the next payout,
but if that seller is banned
then there isn't going to be another payout
and any customer refunds at that point
are going to come out of Amazon's pocket,
unless again,
they want catastrophic damage to their brand
by letting the customer foot the bill.
Of course
there is another option,
fraud is by its very definition illegal,
literally everywhere on earth,
so why doesn't Amazon just take legal action
against these companies and get their money back?
This might seem off topic, but stick with me here.
Have you ever wondered what's up with the random names
that Chinese companies use to brand their wares?
I mean, do they not have Google Translate
to come up with something coherent?
Actually, no but
surely they do have a dictionary, right?
Yes.
But here's the thing,
if you want to sell on Amazon,
you need to have a trademark
and using real pronounceable words
greatly increases the odds
of somebody else having already trademarked your name,
even if it is something stupid like DongSwipe.
So if your business model then involves scamming people
and inevitably being reported and banned from the platform
then you're going to need a lot of trademarks,
so you make gibberish names like
GOVNDVN
or
JDTDC.
Then when you get banned
you just change a single letter,
file a new trademark and
boom, you're back in scams!
I mean business.
And these businesses, or I'll call them operations,
are constantly spinning up new shell companies
in order to obfuscate business partnerships,
move funds and to dodge responsibility.
Here's a great example.
NAIAI has been caught with their pants down here,
or well at least their vendor has.
Look at all these generic listings
that are just waiting to be filled in by their seller.
"Foshanshishundequfeichuangshangmaoyouxiagongsi".
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a burner account,
not even a little.
Back to the idea then of getting money back from these guys.
Even if China's legal system was fair and transparent
and respected the rights of foreign entities,
(coughing)
the cost of going after hundreds or thousands
of these individually small scale scammers
that have completely disappeared into the ether
would almost certainly be greater than the return.
So
it seems that Amazon has made the decision
that the cost of compensating the victims of these scams
is lower than the cost
of preventing them in the first place,
even if that means their entire shopping platform
turns into a hell scape.
Well, sort of,
they apparently did spend $400 million in 2019
combating spam and scams.
But there are just practical limits to what you can do.
I mean, take the review merging exploit, for example.
I mean sure, they could just restrict
everyone's ability to edit their product pages,
but if they did that
then legitimate sellers would struggle to correct errors
or ensure that their pages
accurately reflect any small product revisions,
like say for example, a new color that's available,
by the way, in the US
through the YouTube player itself,
so go check that out.
I mean, that's just one example
of a legitimate reason that product ratings and reviews
should survive a page edit.
It's the same great insulated water bottle,
just in a new fun white and red color scheme,
right?
Or like what if you had a USB 3 product
and all of a sudden you needed to change it
to reflect the new USB 3.2 Gen one nomenclature?
So I don't have the solution,
other than to remember the old adage,
if it seems too good to be true
it might just be a good deal,
but it also might be a scam.
You know what else goes,
the segue to our sponsor.
Squarespace,
running your own business can be hard
but making your website doesn't have to be.
With Squarespace, you get an all-in-one platform
that makes it easy to get your website
up and running quickly.
You can grow your business online
through their marketing features,
including SEO support, email campaigns, and social tools
and they have a wide selection
of award-winning mobile optimized templates
and their commerce platform
comes with everything you need,
from merchandising to checkout.
If you need help, Squarespace offers help guides
and a 24/7 support team.
We love Squarespace so much here,
we even use it for linusmediagroup.com.
Head to squarespace.com/ltt to get 10% off today.
If you guys enjoyed this video
maybe go check out the fake GPUs one,
they really did put an incredible amount of work
into making those things seem real,
but they're not.