This fake 16TB external SSD is Amazon’s best selling new storage release – just don’t buy it
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When compiling our list of the best Black Friday SSD dealswe came across a peach of a product.
The Sajiulas “16TB Portable SSD External Hard Drive” (their description is not ours), a barely believable storage product that is currently Amazon’s number one new release in the highly competitive External Solid State Drives category.
In a nutshell, it claims to be a 16TB external SSD shaped like a Samsung T5 drive, with a sticker price of $109.99. To Amazon’s credit, it comes with free tech support and can be returned until January 31, 2023, giving the customer plenty of time to figure out that it’s not actually a 16TB drive, let alone an SSD drive of 16TB.
What’s the catch?
A genuine external SSD from a recognized brand (2 TB Samsung T7 Shield) sells for $149.99, which is TB for TB, 10 times cheaper.
If something is too good to be true, it probably is, and we have no doubt that in the case of the Sajiulas 16TB SSD, something has gone terribly wrong in Amazon’s filtering system.
Not to be outdone, there’s a 5TB “external portable hard drive” from an obscure company called WIOTA that looks suspiciously like Sajiulas’ product and is the number one new release in the external hard drive category.
Both products have received hundreds of positive reviews and claim to have read/write speeds of 500 Mbps and 450 Mbps, respectively.
A closer look at the ratings reveals a worrying trend; many of the 5 stars are for different products. One says “I ordered a blue one and a pink one, my brother loved his, helps him hold the remote better as he is disabled, love it, thanks” and another, “Really surprised how much liquid he holds without leaking”.
We didn’t link to them so as not to give them more publicity.
What does Amazon do?
Amazon is cracking down on counterfeit and counterfeit products ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022.
The company recently announced that it had seized more than 240,000 items in a single operation in China, bringing the total number of products seized and removed to more than three million. Worryingly, in 2021 there were more than 2.5 million attempts by so-called bad actors around the world to create new sales accounts.
Regardless, there are still loopholes in Amazon’s anti-counterfeiting system, which allows operators like Sajiulas and Wiota to sell counterfeit products to unsuspected customers.
TechRadar Pro has contacted Amazon and will report back if we get a response.