GRC Validrive

[Infrasonic]

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

Why is this a serious problem?
At first this might seem like a minor annoyance: You purchase a 1 or 2 terabyte drive at a bargain price and you receive a 64GB drive instead. But that's NOT what happens here!

The drive appears to be the 1 or 2 terabyte drive you purchased. You plug it into your computer and everything looks fine. You can even copy files to the drive; as many as you want. And when you look at the drive's contents the files are there. But what's insidious is that the files' contents may have never been stored.

These fraudulent drives contain just enough storage – typically 64GB – to convincingly hold the file system's directory listing. But once its first 64GB of storage space has been filled, the contents of any additional files will not actually be stored. Their names, dates and sizes will be stored in the directory at the front of the drive. Everything will appear to be fine. But the files' contents will be blank because they were “stored” where no storage exists.

Operating systems do not verify that the data they write was actually written. They rely upon the honesty of storage devices to report errors. If a write error occurs, then the operating system will rewrite the data elsewhere. But these deliberately fraudulent drives never report any problems – they just silently discard any data written where there's no storage.

The first indication of a problem occurs when
you attempt to read back a stored file. Even that
will appear to work... but the file itself will be empty!

Cont.

[servodude]

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

Why is this a serious problem?
At first this might seem like a minor annoyance: You purchase a 1 or 2 terabyte drive at a bargain price and you receive a 64GB drive instead. But that's NOT what happens here!

The drive appears to be the 1 or 2 terabyte drive you purchased. You plug it into your computer and everything looks fine. You can even copy files to the drive; as many as you want. And when you look at the drive's contents the files are there. But what's insidious is that the files' contents may have never been stored.

These fraudulent drives contain just enough storage – typically 64GB – to convincingly hold the file system's directory listing. But once its first 64GB of storage space has been filled, the contents of any additional files will not actually be stored. Their names, dates and sizes will be stored in the directory at the front of the drive. Everything will appear to be fine. But the files' contents will be blank because they were “stored” where no storage exists.

Operating systems do not verify that the data they write was actually written. They rely upon the honesty of storage devices to report errors. If a write error occurs, then the operating system will rewrite the data elsewhere. But these deliberately fraudulent drives never report any problems – they just silently discard any data written where there's no storage.

The first indication of a problem occurs when
you attempt to read back a stored file. Even that
will appear to work... but the file itself will be empty!

Cont.

Crikey is this still a thing?

I first saw this trick in person over 20 years ago on a drive from a KL market

Purported to be 4GB drive when it was really just a few meg of flash with a hacked ROM to overwrite sectors but report a full FAT
First clue was the lack of spinning and when cracked open there was a tiny board (about 5% of the space) in the 2.5" enclosure hanging off the USB port

Going back further I can remember an interview with Jeff Minter where his pals played a joke on him by getting the local computer (it was in a library or youth centre I think) to pretend it had had a storage upgrade - and he wasted ages writing in a programme that could never run

-sd

[Infrasonic]

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

Cont.

Crikey is this still a thing?

I first saw this trick in person over 20 years ago on a drive from a KL market...
-sd

The difference now is they appear as sponsored ads on Am*z*n et al, and Am*z*n appear to do very little about it.
A bit like G**gle with the sponsored ads that appear at the top of their search results, infested with scammers and malware links.

[servodude]

Crikey is this still a thing?

I first saw this trick in person over 20 years ago on a drive from a KL market...
-sd

The difference now is they appear as sponsored ads on Am*z*n et al, and Am*z*n appear to do very little about it.
A bit like G**gle with the sponsored ads that appear at the top of their search results, infested with scammers and malware links.

Well it's also about 20 years since a work colleague's son was scammed on eBay buying what turned out to be a "photos of a phone" - all above board... if you read the description as a sociopath might i.e. "Please see the photos of a Moto <whatever> that I am selling..."
- scrotes gotta scrote I guess

[swill453]

The difference now is they appear as sponsored ads on Am*z*n et al, and Am*z*n appear to do very little about it.
A bit like G**gle with the sponsored ads that appear at the top of their search results, infested with scammers and malware links.

Well it's also about 20 years since a work colleague's son was scammed on eBay buying what turned out to be a "photos of a phone" - all above board... if you read the description as a sociopath might i.e. "Please see the photos of a Moto <whatever> that I am selling..."
- scrotes gotta scrote I guess

Or the person who bought the "Playstation: box, controller, manual".

Scott.

[servodude]

Well it's also about 20 years since a work colleague's son was scammed on eBay buying what turned out to be a "photos of a phone" - all above board... if you read the description as a sociopath might i.e. "Please see the photos of a Moto <whatever> that I am selling..."
- scrotes gotta scrote I guess

Or the person who bought the "Playstation: box, controller, manual".

Scott.

I could believe that now, after not believing what happened back then

[Infrasonic]

It gets better, Amazon are removing reviews stating the drives are fake (having tested with Validrive first)...https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-945-Notes.pdf page 2

"Thank you for submitting a review of doykob Memory Stick 512 GB USB Stick Fast Speed USB
3.0 Drive Mini USB Metallic Flash Drive Portable USB Memory Sticks for Data Storage and
Transfer, with Keychain (512gb); we’re sorry you did not have a positive experience.

We investigated your concerns about product authenticity, and the information we have indicates
that the product you received was authentic. As a result, we removed the review you
submitted. This ensures that customer reviews remain as accurate as possible for the benefit
of future customers."

I got an ad for fake SSD's on my Pixel 8 pro the other day, courtesy of Google - so it's a wider issue than just Amazon.

[UncleEbenezer]

I got an ad for fake SSD's on my Pixel 8 pro the other day, courtesy of Google - so it's a wider issue than just Amazon.

How do you tell from an ad that it's a fake?

[Infrasonic]

I got an ad for fake SSD's on my Pixel 8 pro the other day, courtesy of Google - so it's a wider issue than just Amazon.

How do you tell from an ad that it's a fake?

They make it bleedin' obvious by advertising things that don't exist - like 20TB USB SSD drives.
The prices are ridiculously cheap as well - 20TB for under $100?...

The ad I saw on my phone was exactly the same as the fake ones I've seen on Amazon - go and search for USB flash or SSD's and you'll see them all over the place.
Clearly they sell enough to keep doing it but for anyone with even a modicum of tech knowledge they are laughably obvious.

[GrahamPlatt]

That sounds like the worst case, but I bought a USB stick with all the correct labelling (Sandisk 32gb USB 3.0), used it for over a year before coming to do something that actually required that oomph (writing an image to it with balena etcher), to have it serially fail to write - and on analysing the thing, found it to be USB 1.0.

[Infrasonic]

That sounds like the worst case, but I bought a USB stick with all the correct labelling (Sandisk 32gb USB 3.0), used it for over a year before coming to do something that actually required that oomph (writing an image to it with balena etcher), to have it serially fail to write - and on analysing the thing, found it to be USB 1.0.

It may not be fake though, just a poor implementation...https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08 ... st-wd-say/

On Thursday, two more lawsuits were filed against Western Digital over its SanDisk Extreme series and My Passport portable SSDs. That brings the number of class-action complaints filed against Western Digital to three in two days.

In May, Ars Technica reported about customer complaints that claimed SanDisk Extreme SSDs were abruptly wiping data and becoming unmountable. Ars senior editor Lee Hutchinson also experienced this problem with two Extreme SSDs. Western Digital, which owns SanDisk, released a firmware update in late May, saying that currently shipping products weren't impacted. But the company didn't mention customer complaints of lost data, only that drives could "unexpectedly disconnect from a computer."

Further, last week The Verge claimed a replacement drive it received after the firmware update still wiped its data and became unreadable, and there are some complaints on Reddit pointing to recent problems with Extreme drives.

Cont.

I've got a load of Sandisk USB flash thumb drives, and my C drive is a Sandisk SSD, that was an RMA replacement for a previous failed Sandisk SSD.
Thankfully that's the only failure I've had so far, and I checked all my USB drives with the Validrive software last week. All hunky dory.

[newlyretired]

OK, I just ordered a couple of 982 GB USB 3.0 Oudley memory sticks from Amazon - star rating 4.8 …
…sure enough Validrive shows that they are actually fake (with 64 GB memory).

I went ahead and left a one star review on Amazon, and I noticed several other recent one star reviews. However my review and all the other one star reviews have disappeared!

What on earth are Amazon playing at?

newlyretired

[servodude]

OK, I just ordered a couple of 982 GB USB 3.0 Oudley memory sticks from Amazon - star rating 4.8 …
…sure enough Validrive shows that they are actually fake (with 64 GB memory).

I went ahead and left a one star review on Amazon, and I noticed several other recent one star reviews. However my review and all the other one star reviews have disappeared!

What on earth are Amazon playing at?

newlyretired

Leaving aside the looking like a duck aspect of these listings - were you refunded?

[newlyretired]

Leaving aside the looking like a duck aspect of these listings - were you refunded?

Yes, I have arranged to return them, and I’m confident that I will be refunded. That’s something that Amazon are generally pretty good about.

newlyretired

[servodude]

Leaving aside the looking like a duck aspect of these listings - were you refunded?

Yes, I have arranged to return them, and I’m confident that I will be refunded. That’s something that Amazon are generally pretty good about.

newlyretired

I suppose they think it is easier to deal with things that way than properly vet the reviews.
Pretty poor show that they remove them leaving a misrepresentative overview

[Redmires]

What on earth are Amazon playing at?

newlyretired

Anything they want. The big tech companies are a law unto themselves. And governments are too scared to take them on.

Two-thirds of all online shopping scams now start on Facebook and Instagram

https://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/medi ... agram.html

[Infrasonic]

...Two-thirds of all online shopping scams now start on Facebook and Instagram

https://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/medi ... agram.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6_FgEn5HjU

I made a fake facebook account to troll romance scammers and it's been hilarious.

[newlyretired]

What on earth are Amazon playing at?

My suspicion is that Amazon’s algorithm is trying to suppress fake reviews, but it’s certainly getting it completely wrong!

newlyretired

[Infrasonic]

https://www.fakespot.com/

[mc2fool]

https://www.fakespot.com/

Hmmm, very marmite reviews https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake-reviews-amazon/reviews/