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Data Storage Crime

Walmart Lists a 30TB Portable SSD for Just $39. It's a Scam (arstechnica.com) 122

Posted by EditorDavid from the buyer-beware dept.
What's the deal with that supposed 30TB external SSD being sold for just $31.40 on China-based online shopping site AliExpress? It's also listed on Walmart's website for just $39 — but first, listen to cybersecurity researcher calling himself "Ray [REDACTED]". Scammer gets two 512MB Flash drives. Or 1 gigabyte, or whatever. They then add hacked firmware that makes it misreport its size... when you go to WRITE a big file, hacked firmware simply writes all new data on top of old data, while keeping directory (with false info) intact.
Ars Technica goes over the details: On the inside, this "SSD" looks like two small-capacity microSD cards hot glued to a USB 2.0-capable board. This board's firmware has been modified so that each of these cards reports its capacity as "15.0TB" to the operating system, for a total of 30TB, even though the actual capacity of the cards is much lower.... It preserves the directory structure of whatever you're copying, but when it's "copying" your data, it just keeps writing and rewriting over the tiny microSD cards.

Everything will look fine until you go to access a file, only to find that the data isn't there.

Replies to Ray Redacted's thread are full of alternate versions of this scam, including multiple iterations of the hot-glued microSD version and at least one that hid a USB thumb drive inside a larger enclosure. Fake USB storage devices are neither new nor rare, though this one makes spectacularly egregious claims about its price-per-gigabyte. When it comes to buying storage online, common-sense advice is best: stick to name brands, buy from trustworthy sellers.... and know that if a deal seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is.
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Walmart Lists a 30TB Portable SSD for Just $39. It's a Scam More

Walmart Lists a 30TB Portable SSD for Just $39. It's a Scam

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  • Hmm....

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's a non-story anyway, only Microsoft(R) Windows(TM) users are affected. From the reviews at walmart.com:

      "Verified Purchaser
      7/13/2022
      Originally had thought the drive was a 16 TB instead of a 30 TB but realized that the windows operating system could not access more than 16 TB.
      Alan"

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Confirmed, no problems for Mac users. Probably since it's Unix underneath, they tend to be very technically competent :

        Walmart.com 7/8/2022:
        "Excellent external drive
        The listed capacity is accurate. It is easy to use with a MacBook Pro. It come with two standard cables - usb-c to usb-c and usb-c to sub-A. Only a usb-c port is on the hard drive which makes data transfer very fast.The hard drive itself doesn't have a battery so it only functions when physically connected to your laptop. Future versions of thi

  • someone from China was peddling a fake product to scam people? I'm shocked, shocked to find that scamming is going on around here!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      The outright fake products do not bother me. If you read and have common sense they are easy to give a skip. It is like the scam where people on EBay were selling the box the MacBook came in for $200

      My concern is that legitimate sellers feel they have to misrepresent. I recently was looking for a new SSD drive. I went to the most reputable seller I knew. I was very disappointed as this seller represented combination of SSD and hard drives as SSD drives. It really took me a while to understand the misdirec

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by fazig ( 2909523 )
        They sold SSHDs (Solid State Hybrid Drive as far as I know) as SSDs?
        That would be rather deceiving. Otherwise it's often the consumers that don't really seem to know what's going on. I've often got to explain that "M.2" is not a definitive qualifier for fast SSDs. Like a SATA SSDs is upgraded to a PCIe NVMe if you plug it into an M.2 slot.

      • This is why one uses a VAR or a fairly reputable reseller. For example, OfficeMax isn't cheap, but in my experience has a clean supply, where if I buy a SSD from them, I'll get exactly what I ordered. Same if I buy from B&H, Adorama, or a similar professional outfitter. Even Newegg has been good at ensuring what was specced is what was physically sent and worked.

        With VARs, their rep is on the line and if they sell a customer an enterprise SSD that consists of a microSD chip with bongoed firmware, th

        • Newegg? You're kidding right?

    • The hacked firmware itself isn't a fake product. They're used to make essentially devices for logging for crappy hardware: the drive pretends to have infinite space but instead has a circular buffer. The thing it's used in just live forever without having to do anything smart.

      Selling it as real is a scam of course.

    • well the real story is that Walmart is the one scamming, still scams in the US are also as common if not more so than china.
      • Walmart isnâ(TM)t scamming anyone. They, like Amazon allow third parties to sell on their site. If enough people complain or enough buzz hits the news theyâ(TM)ll act swiftly and take it down.
        • The reality is, as far as the general muppet buyer is concerned, Walmart IS scamming them, Walmart facilitate it and therefore Walmart is who they will be screaming at.

          • It's only fair for Walmart to be held accountable anyway, it's their platform. It's their job to keep the crap off it, and that means the crap sellers. Nobody takes this job seriously ofc, it would be unprofitable, but that's still where the blame should lie.

            • It's only fair for Walmart to be held accountable anyway, it's their platform. It's their job to keep the crap off it, and that means the crap sellers. Nobody takes this job seriously ofc, it would be unprofitable, but that's still where the blame should lie.

              Oh I actually agree with you that it's their responsibility. But the scale at which an Amazon or a Walmart would need to fully, 100%, proactively screen every company and every product running through their marketplace... well, I understand why they're willing to take occasionally media slams and work reactively too.

            • yep I don't disagree, I think if Amazon, Walmart, Ebay etc had their feet held to the blowtorch more often those marketplaces would be a much safer and better places. They only ever do the bare minimum so they can claim they are trying.

    • It does serve as an illustration to how marketplace sellers like Wal-Mart and Amazon are making a cut of these sales and doing nothing to police it. They are far enough removed that they can just collect the profit and continue to ignore the fake product even after it hits the news.

  • a) A major retailer's online presence that isn't Amazon?

    b) I don't post on this site anymore, and haven't in years.....

  • what was never old is not new again (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EkriirkE ( 1075937 ) on Sunday August 28, 2022 @03:34PM (#62830537) Homepage
    This is older than the internet. I supposed the only story Is that Walmart is(was?) Carrying it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by MrKevvy ( 85565 )
      re: "I supposed the only story Is that Walmart is(was?) Carrying it."

      Not Walmart per se; Walmart online has listed third-party sellers for years(?) [walmart.ca]

      "You'll know if a product is sold by a third party seller by finding the âoeSold & shipped byâ section on any product page or in your cart or at checkout. In this section, you will see the third party seller's name displayed."
      • walmart.ca is CANADIAN walmart. They have what is called "Walmart Marketplace" which is a lot like Amazon or AliExpress where third-part vendors sell through walmart's web site.

        The walmart.com version doesn't have this marketplace.

        • walmart.ca is CANADIAN walmart. They have what is called "Walmart Marketplace" which is a lot like Amazon or AliExpress where third-part vendors sell through walmart's web site.
          The walmart.com version doesn't have this marketplace.

          They clearly still have third party vendors, though. If you look at the US version you will see the same kind of horseshit that gets stuffed into Amazon, with half of the ad copy in the product name that gets used for the page head and title. That is not Wal-Mart's marketing team setting those names. I have no knowledge of how the fulfillment works, though.

  • I say this in china more than 10 years ago (of course with smaller claimed drive sizes)
  • If somebody were to go sell a 2x256MB and have them report as 4TB for $400, somebody might buy it and it might take months before its figured out. At some point these will end up in OEM equipment where the manufacturer doesn't even realize.

    • Re:Scam would be more effective at a higher price (Score:4, Interesting)

      by subreality ( 157447 ) on Sunday August 28, 2022 @06:39PM (#62830973)

      At $30, many people won't take the time trying to file a dispute and shipping the thing back, especially when shipping costs more than they already paid. $400 is enough that people will try harder to get it back.

      • ... trying to file a dispute ...

        I remember when "your computer has a virus" banners appeared on web-pages. Several times, I had to remove a virus the user had paid $150-200 to install. I advised them to reverse the credit-card charge but few of them did. They didn't want to admit they were ignorant and easily tricked into damaging their own equipment.

      • At $30, many people won't take the time trying to file a dispute and shipping the thing back

        Which begs a question of liability. We all expect and can't do f-all about Aliexpress postings. But maybe, just maybe a local company hosting products on its market place should be held accountable for the obvious scam listings on their platform.

        I think it's time Walmart and Amazon spend a few more days in court for selling scams in the USA.

      • If a product is fake then you don't have to pay to return it at all. If the seller refuses a return, you simply contact your credit card company and dispute the charges, and tell them the product was fake. Then they refund you. I'm three for three so far.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          I agree - in principle and in practice. Its why I NEVER buy anything online using a payment method other than Credit Cart, no debit, not paypal, no Zell etc. If you want my business online you'll have to accept credit cards somehow or we simply are not in the same market place. Its because as you say I want the protection the ability to dispute the charges offers both from direct frauds and from someone gaining unauthorized access to the account.

          However I have probably gone down the 'dispute the charges'

          • I can't speak about Walmart's storefront, but in the case of Amazon's storefront, Amazon's customer service would refund your money and then deal with the actual seller and not ban you from Amazon.com. But in the case of Walmart, I don't know if they actually provide customer service for things listed on their marketplace and how they would deal with a chargeback.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by DarkOx ( 621550 )

              Indeed - you should certainly contact customer service for any of the storefront guys before going the CC route.

              I can't say I have ever been the victim of fraud related to an amazon purchase. I have had packages not show up though and things arrived damaged from shipping.

              I have NEVER had any push back from customer service with them despite all the horror stories you read online. Amazon has been quick to offer a refund or ship out a replacement every time, both Sold-by-Amazon and Market place stuff.

              • Yeah I hear horror stories sometimes. They are usually short on the details I would want to know, though, like is the customer a chronic-returner. My experience with Amazon had been quite good.

          • You can revert debit card charges too, it is just as easy. The cards are just cheaper both for you and the merchants. You don't need to feed the greedy credit card scam.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by DarkOx ( 621550 )

              banks may or may not let you do that. With CC the law is on your side, its not the same. Also work toward decent credit and then get a rewards card. You are just paying for other people rewards if you don't.

              • From the law point of view it is the same it is still the bank letting you revert it. And credit cards hide their fees by forbidding merchants from charging them. So the customer rarely noticed it is sifyning off 3-5% of everything they spend to put on the banks pockets, giving you 0.1% back as rewards.

    • Oh. Oh. I've seen similar scams with other hardware, especially network cards and drive controllers. Looking carefully at the card, and seeing that the numbers on the critical chip have been burned off, is a dead giveaway that the "lowest price, best quality" card is fraudulent. I had to ban a vendor who had the lowest hardware prices but kept selling absolute.... "unlabeled component" hardware, swearing they'd "provide fixes" but every lot had a new problem. I also notified other clients, I became concerne

  • anybody with common sense would be able to tell right away 30 TB Drive would never be portable but rather bulky and big

    • Umm, why? 64 1/2 gig micro SD cards probably weigh less than the industrial strength rubber you've had in your wallet since school.

      • Umm, why? 64 1/2 gig micro SD cards probably weigh less than the industrial strength rubber you've had in your wallet since school.

        Yeah, but that's still only 32GB. You'd need 64000 (ish) for a 32TB drive ...

    • anybody with common sense would be able to tell right away

      Would you mind checking again just where it was sold?

    • For some definitions of bulky and big. The actual flash chip or chips inside a 2.5" SSD take up very little space and could be multiples of their actual size if they actually made an attempt to fill the empty space with flash chips.

      A 3.5" form factor could probably fit 30TB of flash, though heat dissipation might be a problem.

      It might be kind of clunky to work with, but you could probably fit an entire RAID storage subsystem made up of NVMe modules into a 3.5" disk form factor.

      • Samsung announced a 30TB drive in the 2.5 inch server form factor (same footprint as a laptop drive, but thicker) a few years ago, I can't seem to find anywhere with it in stock new anymore but I did find one used on ebay, so presumablly some were made/sold.

    • What percentage of people have any clue where we are on the Moore's Law timeline and what the density per mm^2 of storage is these days? It's just as likely that they'd have a hard time imagining 64GB fitting in a package so small.

  • Ray [REDACTED] sounds like a great bloke

  • walmart has started getting more creepy like amazon and ebay, just another thieving bunch of gangsters wanting to scalp their customers

    • walmart has started getting more creepy

      Wait, wait, I saw this movie! The year as you remember it is... 1986, right?

  • They are found wherever 3rd party goods are sold. Some are relabeled SD cards and the packaging is very very similar to the real thing

    • They are found wherever 3rd party goods are sold. Some are relabeled SD cards and the packaging is very very similar to the real thing

      They're everywhere on eBay. I got one a few years ago and then had to deal with the seller whining about the negative feedback I gave him*

      * I don't think he intended to sell a fake SD card, but when he got a bunch of SD cards for an unrealistically low price he should have tested them himself before reselling them for a still unrealistically low price.

    • This product is literally two fake SB cards in a USB hub.

  • Amazon's site is chock-full of crap. Where does it all come from? No idea. Are they pulling it in from somewhere? Are they providing an API and letting someone push it? Couldn't tell you, haven't even tried to find out. But you can get almost all the same cheap Chinese shit you can get on Amazon, and for about the same prices. So maybe it comes from the same middlemen.

    It would be surprising if there weren't a bunch of scammy crap hidden in that blizzard of shit. And very little that you can buy at Walmart i

  • Third party marketplaces need to die. (Score:3)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Sunday August 28, 2022 @06:02PM (#62830877) Homepage
    This a prime example why Ebay market junk should stay on Ebay. Amazon and Walmart are just diluting their brand and reputation. Well, Amazon has ruined their reputation; but Walmart? Come on, you can be better. The problem is that this is happening to all the big popular online retailers.

    I hate to bring up regulation, but this third party seller crap that isn't even a business within the country needs to be regulated out of existence.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      EBAY is/was for people to resell their used goods (and scalp hard to find electronics lol). EBAY was ruined when it became flooded with cheap Chinese garbage.
      You can find all of that on Aliexpress.

      • EBAY is/was for people to resell their used goods ... EBAY was ruined when it became flooded with cheap Chinese garbage.

        I use Ebay a lot. I just avoid the new stuff.

      • I go to eBay or Amazon to buy cheap Chinese shit when I want it to come from a warehouse in the USA. While a small handful of Aliexpress sellers have US warehouses, almost everything on there is shipped direct from China. It's easy to forget that eBay substantially predates the existence of both Amazon and Aliexpress (or indeed, Alibaba, or Wish, or frankly practically any current e-commerce site) and used to be the only place to get that stuff. I've been using eBay since May of 2000. (1170 feedback, 100% p

    • Walmart kind of solves this problem by listing their own validated supply chain stuff first in search results if they have anything in their database that matches a search AND they have a checkbox to limit search results to their own validated supply chain stuff. As a user, it is easy to identify and filter out third parties on Walmart but impossible to do on Amazon. But, yeah, nuking third party sellers from high orbit is the only real solution. I haven't heard anyone make an argument to make it against

  • Everybody knows that you have to pay at least $45 for 30 TB.

  • This has been around at least a decade, there's a linux port / fork or some such.
    Writes data to every byte, reads it back to confirm it's good.

    Takes a while, you should do this to any disk, INCLUDING hard drives if you've paid a lot for them. I just did it to 8x16TB Exos drives (and found a faulty, thanks to it)

    Worth using so you know you can (probably) rely on the media even as it fills up.

    • It's actually much older than that. I remember when even 5.25" floppies were sometimes marked as double sided double density when they were actually certified for neither. But thank you for reading the Twitter thread!!! It was meant to be a fun and lighthearted thread.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Heh' I remember back when people used to sell paper cutter like things to cut the knock into the side the disk to tell the drive it was high density media.

        It actually worked too, to a point. What actually determined the density was the low-level format on the disk. So you could turn a double-density floppy in to high density floppy by cutting the slot and reformatting. The issue was the lower-density media was so labeled because the magnetic layer allowed to much bleeding into adjacent areas. So if you did

    • Yeah, we write (pseudo) random data to (pseudo) random sized files, filling the entire device and then read them back. It can take a while -

      Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md0 1.3P 308T 1002T 24% /mnt/disk1

    • Why waste the time when the price alone gives it away as a fake. h2testw is only relevant if you believe you're buying something which may be legitimate. There's no point testing a product that costs less than $2/TB in 2022

  • I guess greed realiably causes blindness to reality...

    • That is true. But remember, the average slashdot reader is way more techincal and way more savvy than probably 99% of the general computer using population. These scammers are not targeting your typical slashdot user. They are targeting our parents, our friends, and our cousins. Ray (author of the original Tweet thread)
  • This is a not a scam, it's write-only memory.
    Learn to read the fine print, it's clearly written in Chinese!

    • I already have one of those built into my machine. I don't know just how big it is but so far it holds every backup I ever made and no sign of ever getting full. It's insanely fast, too.

      Mountpoint is /dev/null

  • Google and Facebook should use these drives for all the personal data they collect. Too much data? Old stuff just is overwritten. Data hoarders should use these to download the internet, just in case. Trump should use these to store all those secret documents. The applications are endless. *Silence*
  • You see a picture of something real cheap, you click on the picture, and it is an ACCESSORY to the product, and the product is 10 times more expensive or the like. Now the 'store' may run these scams online, but I also get direct email with these product pictures and unrelated prices. I do wish regulatory authorities make Ali-express stop this bait and switch misleading clickbait and the like stop showing things like multimeter for $4, you click on it, and the $4 is just for the leads or powercord (not show

  • This happened a while back, maybe even here on /., where a guy bought a external HD for a low price only to have the same issue. He took it apart and found a small flash drive and a big stainless nut epoxied to the chassis to give it some weight.

  • I've avoided Walmart since the start for other reasons, but this is just one more reason to avoid them: if they're stupid enough to peddle something like this without checking it out first...

  • Testing for this (Score:4)

    by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Monday August 29, 2022 @09:49AM (#62832547)
    On Windows, you can test for this kind of misreporting with a tool called H2testw. You can find it with a quick Google, the official website is in German but you can get it at any of the common software download sites that are in English.
  • This seems like a lot of effort for $39. Considering the cost of the two microSD cards, and having to manually hack the firmware it hardly seems worth it. Plus how much can they make before it's discovered and no one is buying their products?

  • Just bought one from Amazon for $79. Ariving today. I thought it hard to believe it was true but it's been along time since I bought a HD. I have two macs with 2TB between them to backup. I trust Amazon will refund me if its a scam.

  • 30 terabytes? More like 30 terriblebytes.

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