Amazon is a great place to buy almost anything you need. Prices are competitive as there is usually a wide selection of retailers selling similar items.
When it comes to technology and gadgets, bigger is usually better. With a fast central processing unit, a more powerful graphics card, and lots of RAM, you should be fine for years to come. Of course, you also need a hard drive. Storage 101: How to keep your USB and external hard drives safe for years.
The problem is that fake tech gadgets have appeared on Amazon recently. Read on for signs that technology isn’t what it should be.
here’s the inside story
Every computer needs a hard drive, but sometimes you want to go mobile or add storage. A great option for this situation is a portable hard drive. The more capacity, the better. Finding the perfect hard drive on Amazon doesn’t have to be difficult. As Review Geek recently discovered, that’s not always the case.
Portable drives can be relatively bulky, averaging about 2-5 terabytes (TB) in capacity. More than that is rarely needed. One popular format is the Solid State Drive (SSD), which sells for between $50 and $100 depending on brand and capacity.
“So Amazon offering a 16TB external SSD hard drive for under $100 seems perfect,” explains Review Geek. But after the lengthy process of ordering drives and waiting for delivery, some things didn’t seem to fit.
The packaging didn’t look good, there were some typos in the text, and the specs didn’t make sense. It turned out that it was not using a USB 3.0 connection, but using a USB 2.0 instead.
However, that is the least relevant discovery. Hard drive capacity he turned out to be only 64GB instead of 12TB as advertised. Cracking open the case reveals a microSD card inserted into a USB-C adapter instead of a solid-state drive. The whole device is fake!
what you can do about it
There are a few things you can do to stay safe when shopping online, especially on Amazon. There is a tool called Fakespot. This is a free Chrome extension that detects fake reviews and warns you of suspicious sellers. FakeSpot is also available as a free app for iOS and Android.
You can use Fakespot to shop at Amazon and other retailers like Walmart and Best Buy. Here are some more tips to avoid buying fakes.
- Avoid buying from sellers with poor ratings or brands you are not familiar with.
- Read comments and reviews about products to see what other people say about them.
- Be wary of product listings that seem exaggerated or too good to be true.
In the case of this fake hard drive, Amazon explained that “review merging” may be the culprit. It is against Amazon policy for a seller to combine her two product pages to give a false impression. Fortunately, the fake product has been removed from Amazon. But others could show up at any time.
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