30TB Portable SSD Hits Walmart for $39 but Stay Away from It
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
When ordering electronics from Walmart Marketplace, particularly TVs, I’ve found that the marketplace sellers freely substitute makes and models. Maybe nobody notices if you are shipping a gift to someone else, but since I need specific models from specific manufacturers for development it gets noticed when I order LG model XYZ and get a no-name tv instead. I stopped ordering from Walmart altogether after the second time (out of two, consecutive) that happened.
So my advice is anything you buy online at Walmart, make sure it is not a marketplace seller, just save yourself the trouble.
In all cases Wal-Mart refunded my money after waiting for a week for the vendor to respond, though I had to lug the stuff to the UPS store to return it. Amazon usually suggests I donate stuff rather then return it.
I’ve not had any issues with the items sold by Wal-mart actual, those you can buy with confidence.
Don't get me wrong, when this happens, I get that feeling of rip off, but the reality is, I didn't price shop. And someone did some work to get it to show up for me where I was looking.
Definitely don’t recommend.
So he'd just order pizzas for himself, and pocket the difference.
Not if you're trying to avoid Amazon for moral boycott reasons (as the OP was). In that case, people are willing to knowingly pay an additional fee to avoid Amazon, but that money is just being pocketed and the rest of the money is being turned over to Amazon on their behalf.
Amazon also has a lot of famous worker safety/treatment issues for their delivery drivers and warehouse workers. I doubt they are unique in the fulfillment space, but they are extremely well publicized. Walmart has issues as well, but their publicized issues were in stores. Walmart online avoids the worst publicized worker treatment issues.
In my mind Wal-Mart is actually the evil one, I watched them destroy entire towns in the 80s. Everyone ended up working there, full time if they were lucky, and they gave all their money back every week because there was nowhere else in town left to spend it.
Buy the time Amazon came around the destruction was over. What Amazon did was raise the bar on customer service so high that everybody else had to follow. That is a net positive I believe.
It's invariably no taste and petty power struggles, magnified. Like one of those 1950s giant insect monster movies.
Power needs to be coupled to cultivation or something.
You've really hit the mark with that comment.
https://blog.bestbuy.ca/best-buy/what-is-best-buy-marketplac...
Odd.
So, now I'm back to trying to find a reputable retailer that sells authentic products.
In mid-November, Walmart.com warned me to "Order soon to guarantee that you'll get <x> for Christmas."
So, I did the "responsible" thing and ordered the drone before Thanksgiving and it arrived around Nov 25.
Wrap it up. Son opens it on Christmas, aaaaand it's broken out of the box. One of the rotors was bent and wouldn't rotate.
Brought it to Walmart probably on the 27th of December and Walmart tells me, "This was sold by one of our 3rd party vendors. You have to take it up with them."
3rd party vendor tells me to pound sand because there's a 30 day return policy. Remember how I was responsible and got the drone a month ahead of time?
In retrospect, I should have disputed the charge, but it didn't occur to me at the time.
Still makes me angry.
I am mean this is a decades old problem from not having the correct batteries, to missing parts, etc etc. Alot of Christmas day disappointments could be avoided by just inspecting the toys before wrapping them.....
Every kid has the "one thing" they really want that year, I always see posts by parents that they "one thing" was missing a part, or did not have batteries, or like this case was damaged.
And opening many children toys is usually pretty difficult without scissors and or destroying the packaging. The amount of time consuming precision tape peeling without removing the graphic layer of cardboard may be a little untenable around Christmas.
Of course now as an adult I hate gifts, I buy what I need/want when I need/want it. I do not want other people to spend money on me at all.. Most holidays have become soo commercialized that the consumerism of it all puts me off
The gifts tend to skew more towards art, fabrics, jewelry, house items. Things that are uniquely found in a particular place, not exactly expensive but mostly hard to acquire / stumble upon.
But yes I agree, the commercialized consumerism is quite off putting. I am grateful for it though, as I am now coming full circle and rediscovering the joy from a very human and primordial action.
I dislike a lot of gift giving, but I do not dislike gifts. Most people who know me well knows I really don't care for pointless tchotchkes, but I do value actually useful gifts. When I use those gifts, I remember the person who gave it to me and get a reminder of their friendship or love. A perfect example is a pocket knife I usually have on me which my wife gave me as a gift; I always think about her every time I use it.
Which, we should stress, is toxic nonsensical shit.
Consumerist crap which promotes an always-buying culture of throwing away things instead of reduce+reuse.
or stop ordering from the marketplace sellers. I like ordering directly from websites for vendors i do business with. This is why I do not shop on ebay.
From Amazon I rarely order anything that is not "shipped and sold by amazon", on walmart I only order Walmart Stock, on newegg I only order newegg stock, etc etc
Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.
It’s the long tail. Need an unbranded under-desk treadmill manufactured by Xiaomi? Amazon marketplace has ever color of the rainbow at prices only reasonable for dropshippers.
There’s ofc downsides to that, but certain consumers don’t mind.
Digi-Key, an electronic parts distributor which used to have a good reputation for supply chain quality, added "marketplace" sellers. Before this, when you ordered from Digi-Key, you were assured that the product went directly from the manufacturer to Digi-Key in Minnesota and then to you. You got exactly what you ordered. Now, it's much iffier.
Money. No inventory (i.e. capital), no COGS, no returns (depending on the model), no assortment optimization. Just a share of what someone else does.
Having said that there was one time I had this same issue...I bought from Walmart's marketplace and the product wasn't what I ordered. I had no issue with returning it.
In fact that is one of my biggest beefs with amazon, the way they have it set up it is very hard, if not impossible to figure out who you are buying stuff from.
ebay sellers do the same. I pay using paypal on ebay, just to get a gift package from amazon prime. Stopped using ebay and every scammer like that got negatives from me. They are still cheaper than non-amazon sellers
There is no real reason why they have it so wrong.
Also, I buy expensive things direct from the manufacturer if I buy online. No chance for counterfeit items that way.
Wal Mart and Amazon are nothing more than digital flea markets at this point.
As others have said, when something goes wrong, they're not going to remember "Oh, marketplace seller biteme42069 was a rip-off, avoid them", they'll just blame Walmart.
It's funny-- Amazon has managed to so squander their reputation that Walmart-- once the epitome of schlocky retail-- had managed to look decent by comparison. They had a strong enough nationwide logistics network that they could challenge the "but-but Prime 7-minute delivery" argument, and the direct nanufacturer connections to ensure they had authentic, controlled inventory. They could have been a more trustworthy choice.
I sell on both Walmart and Amazon. As somethingwitty1 said, this works in multiple directions; people dropshipping ittems from Amazon directly to Walmart customers, from Walmart to Amazon customers, and from both to eBay customers.
It's also forbidden. Both Walmart and Amazon explicitly warn against shipping items to customers in competitors' boxes; Walmart even explicitly bans tracking numbers starting with "TBA". If your wife reports that this is happening to Walmart buyer support, the sellers won't be there for long; recent anecdotes say that both companies are really cracking down on dropshipping.
>When ordering electronics from Walmart Marketplace, particularly TVs, I’ve found that the marketplace sellers freely substitute makes and models.
Ugh. All I can say that I've also had less-than-positive experiences when buying from other sellers on both platforms. Amazon is notorious for allowing anyone to open a seller account. Walmart is in theory supposed to be much stricter in examining applicants' qualifications, with many waiting for weeks or months. While this is great from my perspective (both in terms of improving the overall quality of third-party sellers, and minimizing my competition), the incompetent and crooked are still getting through; Walmart recently allowing non US-domiciled sellers (i.e., Chinese) doesn't help.
>I’ve not had any issues with the items sold by Wal-mart actual, those you can buy with confidence.
Agreed. Amazon commingles its own inventory and that of third-party sellers that Amazon handles storage and shipping for (FBA); as a result, my own confidence in the genuineness of, say, household staples from Amazon has plummeted. I think Walmart does not do so with WFS, its FBA equivalent. In any case WFS much less used than FBA, because there is little advantage for sellers to do so over fulfilling items themselves.
It’s horrible and they won’t do anything about it despite contacting them via help requests and Twitter.
3 of the top 5 listings are total scams.
And Amazon’s choice for 1TB flash drive is a scam: USB Flash Drive 1TB, Flash Memory Stick for PC/Laptop, Ultra Large Storage USB Drive, Portable Thumb Drives (Black) https://a.co/d/cTi7XqZ
I would guess it adjusts for shipping time and result relevance weighted by previous usage. For me, the choice 1TB flash drive is a PNY thumb drive.
At the very least, it seems brave to assign your company’s endorsement automatically based on an algorithm.
I believe it is the same for all users for a given keyword search, but it is also dynamically changing.
From [1], the algorithm itself is a black box though:
> One innovation the company devised is “Amazon’s Choice,” a distinctive black badge typically bestowed on a single product per search term. The company says the award is given to “highly rated, well-priced products available to ship immediately.” But for many categories, dozens of options fit that description. How does Amazon choose its choices? Do humans have a hand in the decisions, or are they governed by an algorithm?
> The company won’t say. “Amazon’s Choice is just our recommendation, and customers can always ask for specific brands or products if they choose,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/what-does-amazons-choice-mean/
I stopped using amazon around 2 years ago. If i want to buy "Chinesium" i use aliexpress and save a lot of middlemen in return for a long shipping time.
I've been burned by fake products a few times and learned my lesson long ago. Sure, amazon does make it easy to return them, but going to a real store avoids it all-together.
If you shop around for prices, it is rare that amazon's prices are even competitive vs an actual physical store these days.
this makes little sense, the store has employees and high rents, what are amazon's reasons?
Genuine question, what store is this that:
1) has inventory in store of items like this
2) doesn’t also ever have fake merchandise on their shelves
The problem isn’t just Amazon, Walmart, or other large online retailers, it’s issues throughout the supply chain because of the lack of enforcement by all actors (retailers, distributors, shippers, manufacturers, customs agents, government agencies, etc).
So I’m not finding the news article at the moment on counterfeit electronics goods re: Target, but there’s been a couple I remember.
here’s one on makeup that I found searching though:
Fry's used to be good for that sort of thing on the West coast too, but they're long dead.
I'm Canadian so "Canada computers" comes to mind. They are almost always price-competitive with Amazon, and you can check their stock online before you go (they do ship as well)
They have been around for a long time and built a reputation of not selling crap. You can go there and know that what you buy will be a decent product. Maybe not as wide a selection as "amazon" but they carry the top of almost any category.
Newegg has been great for at least a decade as well?
The fake stuff isn't amazon or walmart, it is almost always "third party sellers" which many stores dont offer for obvious reasons (reputation damaging fraud).
What makes you trust a brick and mortar store's supply chain more than an online store? There are counterfeit items everywhere.
Number of fake/counterfeit items i have gotten from a bricks and morter store : 0
Number of fake/counterfeit items i have gotten off amazon prior to giving up on it : 6
Dig into this counterfeit items issue more deeply, it is almost always "third party sellers" and amazon's commingling that is causing these problems. Don't allow third party sellers, don't commingle your inventory and it is a LOT harder to introduce counterfeit items into your stock.
I was still seething over some of the storage ones when, a few years ago, I joined an anti-counterfeiting startup. (Sadly, our successful MVP launch integrated into a high-end factory production line happened just as Covid was breaking out, which spooked our flagship customer, and impacted followthrough we needed, then we ran out of runway while pivoting.)
As a consumer, I can imagine a lot of things that the marketplaces like Amazon.com and Walmart.com could do to improve trustworthiness. I don't know whether those make business sense. I'd love to see consumers reward a marketplace that conspicuously kept out the scammers.
Ideally, the solution would protect integrity of all brands, not only house brands.
Nestle have no problem putting up $5M, but most good small companies just can't.
So the end effect is that you enable big monopolies.
You need to invent some kind of reputation system. Small towns (and communities) have this builtin as everybody knows almost everybody. Amazon is missing the ability to say "this is a new seller without solid reputation".
But I'm guessing this would be bad for short-term thinking, the wish for "the everything store".
You can't be quality store and "everything store". Everything is mostly junk (Sturgeon's law).
This is how it works with credit card companies where I live. The credit card company is jointly liable with the supplier. It works fine and the consumer is protected. "Marketplaces" are still in the relative wild west when it comes to liability here.
This is a question of whether there should be any real accountability at all. We're currently at one extreme and debating whether to take the smallest step away from that; a real middle ground is a long ways off.
So long as the marketplace can confirm that someone will take responsibility for product quality, I don’t see an issue. Smaller companies will be able to be more hands on with a marketplace. As in, actually having a person to communicate with customers and/or the marketplace.
The problem only is an issue for fly by night sellers that just generate new identities when a marketplace delists them. Having a little bit of due diligence added to the marketplace is a good thing for both buyers and sellers.
If the marketplace is jointly liable, it could be as simple as them then requiring sellers to have a typical $2m liability policy from a licensed insurance company naming the seller and marketplace and provide proof of insurance before selling. If anyone shows up to sue over the product, you just direct them to the insurance company.
If you’re not doing anything dumb and don’t have a history of doing anything dumb, getting some basic liability insurance should be cheap and trivial.
It completely outsources the costs and moderation and probably _saves_ the marketplace money versus the current arrangement.
The only way you continue to sell a bunch of fake / dangerous products is if the insurance companies are taking losses on this. And they’ve shown themselves pretty adept at avoiding losses.
I've yet to see any evidence that marketplaces are actually interested in vetting sellers ... or buyers, for that matter.
Marketplaces are basically all about taking their % of the sale, yet getting to shrug and walk away if the transaction goes south.
Right now I use h2testw on all storage I purchase, but you kinda need to know this is a thing.
The combination of regulations and buying from reputable sellers should be enough IMO... though most people would probably view Walmart as a reputable seller, so that clearly doesn't work.
d = random_block()
for block in capacity:
block.write(d)
if block.read() != d:
fail("fake disk")
Since storage devices are often bigger than RAM, the data is probably best to generate procedurally (but deterministically) from the block number.
That sounds like fun!
* write encrypted zeroes
* decrypt it and count the zeroes
I think cbc mode is enough. I see a possible computational loophole, which I want to check before I post.
I was on a machine with limited user space. I used OpenSSL, no new binaries, reading and writing at close-to-wire speeds. "Counting zeroes" would track down where they don't match, doesn't it?
https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.htm...
I've used it on a 2GB microSD that came with a 3d printer that turned out to be 100MB. I continued to use it to transport files to my 3d printer for a bit with this.
The documentation does mention it is possible for more advanced fake firmware to bypass this, but I don't think anyone has bothered yet. It's labelled experimental because of that, but I believe that was at least 5 years ago.
Jeez, this last detail elevates it from scam to plain malicious... Overwriting files isn't likely to conceal the scam much longer for a drive that already missreports it's size and is limited to 60MB/s - but it is likely to lose data for someone who actually manages to reach that capacity.
[edit]
Not speculation, reality... following the link to similar drives on amazon by a sibling comment, first 1 start review shows story of data loss [0]:
> They have figured out a way for it to tell the computer that it's a hard drive with 1 or 2TB, where it really is 128GB, according to the engineers who looked at it [...] I spent several hundred dollars to retrieve a few documents that were critical to me [...]
These drives are costing non technical people data loss, not just money.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B08SBHV3VT/ref=acr_dp...
[0] https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduct...
edit: Reading through the text and looking at the pictures, it's obvious that it's a third-party, but nothing on the site explicitly says "this is a seller not associated with Walmart".
Comparison:
Amazon: https://i.imgur.com/rGdTkM4.png
Walmart: https://i.imgur.com/JRwhzBy.png
Edit: Ahhh, of course. You're right, thanks guys.
The only reason I ever buy from Walmart is when I want the product the same day and am willing to drive 10 min to my local store. If that isn’t the case, I have the entire internet of sellers to choose from and it surely isn’t going to be Walmart that I pick.
Try buy a can opener that doesn't bend on first use or a wooden spoon in your local wal-mart, I dare you. It's just one step above DOLLAR GENERAL from where I'm sitting.
The kitchen equipment aisle is what comes to mind here - you can buy the cheap spoon for $.99 or you can buy the better one that doesn’t have the issues you describe for a few dollars more. Which one you buy is up to you.
We just bought a midrange quality ice cream scoop from Target locally, the thought process being that Target usually has higher quality items. Then later that same day we went to Walmart for some low quality disposable items and saw that exact ice cream scoop for a dollar less than Target. Oops.
I don't understand this complaint in this day and age. Can you point me to a brick-and-mortar store that has mostly high-quality long-lasting items?
But in terms of big-box retailers it has indeed become a depressing reality in the USA, ever since Sears closed down.
FWIW the last few times I abandoned hope in the kitchenware aisles of Wal-Mart I found something reasonable at Bed Bath & Beyond, a brick-and-mortar store. But it did admittedly require still splurging on basically top-of-the-line variants at BB&B. Such options were nowhere to be found in Wal-Mart though, not even close.
My impression is that the big-box retailers just don't go deep on the quality axis, they instead go wide on the quantity axis in terms of kinds of products. Within the ~quality axis they often just have cosmetically different looking dolled-up variants of more or less the same garbage with a higher price tag.
But if you go somewhere with a narrower scope like BB&B, you can at least find tangible differences along the quality axis. And they sure demand top-of-the-line prices for quality levels we once took for granted before China turned up the wick on this race to zero :(
I don't find buying stuff online instead of in person nearly as attractive a proposition as I used to. Whether that's just because of the negative experiences or just because of priority rebalancing after growing older, I have no way of knowing, but whenever I need to buy something I almost always look for it at several local stores first, either in-person or via the "pick up in store" option on their sites.
Granted, a similar argument could be made about eBay, so I think history plays a huge role. When Walmart puts up a marketplace for 3rd-parties without clearly disclaiming it as being from not-Walmart, Walmart's history and reputation as a direct seller customers lets a reasonable customer conclude that they are buying it directly from Walmart. eBay was never a seller themselves, and doesn't have Walmart's reputation, so products listed on eBay don't cause the same customer confusion.
I think the issue is that we'd need a regulation and one that clearly stipulates what the situation is. For example, one could propose that when a retailer that sells goods as a first party also provides a marketplace for third party goods, 10% of the page's size above the fold must be the third party's branding and that branding must be larger than the branding of the retailer. That would make it very obvious.
One of the issues that we're facing is that our regulations often don't specify enough of how something must be implemented. For example, sites must label their ads. Google used to make the ads have a different color background that made it easy to visually filter ads from organic results. Now they just write "Ad" in light grey (#aaadb2) against a gray background (#202124) with much less prominence and contrast than the title of the link. Twitter puts "Promoted" below the tweet rather than at the top of the tweet so that when you're scrolling you'll read the tweet before seeing that it's an ad (and it's rgb(113, 118, 123) (light gray) on black while the regular text is rgb(231, 233, 234) (nearly white) on black). The FTC does require that ads and sponsored content be clearly labeled, but doesn't really specify or enforce standards. I think if I labeled something as "Ad" as #aaadb2 on a #aaadb1 background, that clearly wouldn't pass muster. There'd be almost zero contrast. How much contrast is needed? How prominent should we require messages that clarify important things like this?
As you note, you're going to Walmart.com and giving your information to Walmart on a page where Walmart's logo and branding is basically all that you see - except for a tiny "Sold by XYZ" note. I don't know what the solution is entirely, but it's going to take regulatory action if we want to deal with this. If Amazon is doing it, Walmart will do it. If Google is limiting the contrast on how it marks ads, Twitter will also limit the contrast.
So many of our regulations and laws are designed under the assumption that time and attention are unlimited. Under such an assumption, misrepresenting the seller for 95% of the page is fine, because you'll notice the 5% that gives accurate information. Advertising designed to give false impressions are fine, because of course you'll notice that nothing was specifically claimed about a product. Terms of service and privacy policies are binding no matter how unnecessarily long they are, because you have unlimited time to sift through them.
But those assumptions are all clearly and blatantly untrue.
That option is actually not always available for some reason (maybe if all of the options on the current page will be shipped from Amazon anyway)… but I always check it when it is and I don't want any shady sellers to be included.
They do. Search target.com for some suitably generic thing like 'portable hard drive' and you'll see some are labeled like this: "Sold and shipped by Mega Retail Store a Target Plus™ partner"
I didn’t understand, so I decided to format it. What was my surprise when the 8 GB disk turned into 1 GB? I researched like crazy, and then found out in some forum that they would tweak the firmware to tell the OS about its fake size, though I’m not sure how formatting it would ‘fix’ this. After formatting it, it worked normally and for many years.
In the end, it is the same stupid technique, 15 years later. I’m not sure why wouldn’t they just sell it with proper specifications and profit over the okay quality of the device..
When you reparationed your OS probably read the true disk size (correctly reported by firmware) and made a brand new partition table, partition and file system on top of it.
It’s getting harder and harder to find non marketplace sellers at both Amazon and Walmart. Starting to default to target and Home Depot and Best Buy for now.
The firmware is actually not much of a hack, but quite in line with how flash memory operates. Flash memory can't be modified, but rather needs to be bulk erased and then written. Thus an address doesn't indicate a physical place but rather goes through some indirection data structure. The hacked firmware just reports a larger capacity, and silently discards older blocks it's supposed to be hanging onto.
That doesn’t sound right.
It seems unhelpful that both "it is" and "it isn't" can be used to convey "it's not as good as it appears", though.
It doesn't sound right indeed because it should read "it is," not "it isn't." Regardless, "something sounding too good to be true" is how you determine that tech innovation has happened. The Retina screen sounded too good to be true back in 2012; the M1 sounded too good to be true; etc.
I won’t buy from them anymore. It’s just worse Amazon.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/after-allegations-of-knowi...
I wouldn't give them my money, personally. Their willingness to sell garbage to customers and blame the customers is not the mark of a good business.
In my experience they run a great store. I also don't think they have the kind of third-party seller BS that Amazon and Walmart do.
It's a little funny to me because as recently as the early 2010s, Best Buy felt like a joke. I don't know that they've changed much from then to now, but Amazon and Newegg are shadows of what they used to be. Best Buy seems like a paragon of reliability in comparison.
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#sort=...
Also be sure to check external drives. Sometimes it's cheaper to buy one of those and then discard the enclosure.
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/external-hard-drive/#sort=...
In general stick to well known brands of whatever you're looking at. If you want to save money, then expand your knowledge of the lesser tier brands based on what people are talking about (eg r/buildapc r/buildapcsales). Make a spreadsheet of models across vendors, rather than trusting an individual vendor's search functionality. That's just a good idea anyway, to make sure you're not getting gouged by a vendor.
The scam listing under discussion doesn't even purport to have a brand name, not even a GENSYM brand. The only way you're going to get there is to search for capacity and sort by price. Don't do that.
My understanding is that "ships from and sold by Amazon.com" is not safe, since those items are often commingled into the general FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) stock.
You can pick up a 2TB PNY NVMe SSD for $129 right now: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/pny-xlr8-cs3030-2tb-internal-pc...
Bottom of the barrel microSD is about $2.50, I don’t smoke but a pack of cigarette is over twice as that. So microSD-based devices should be able to be distributed in a similar affordability and scale, with computing resource of perhaps late 80s PC. What could it do, for the good or for fun?
This is exactly what Raspberry Pi's use, so the answer is yes.
Maybe RPis do OK cause they just load the system once, maybe even sequentially. I also keep a card in my MBP. It takes forever to write directories, but it's good enough to store Xcode etc only cause the RAM caches things. Torrenting Ubuntu onto it was unusably slow. I expect it'd be unusable as single-level storage.
0: https://www.globalspec.com/Industrial-Directory/nand_flash_c...
Thanks for the link - that was in my mind but didn’t realize I was almost lifting sentences from that page :p
>limited to USB 2.0 speeds
Nice.
It’s the ‘trying to be the curated next gen shopping experience’ but really being a digital flea market. Which, don’t ever buy furniture at those, they got the name for a reason.
A great way of describing it. You can't trust any large online retailer these days. Every top result on Amazon is from a brand with random letters that has no accountability. Even Etsy is filled with tons of "Verified handmade" items that are obviously mass produced products from Alibaba/AliExpress (they don't even bother to use different pictures than the original listing). I ordered something off Wayfair this week and what I got was totally lower quality than the pictures.
If I buy something from walmart.com and it happens to be a 3rd party seller, MY MONEY STILL GOES THROUGH WALMART. Or at least that's what my credit card statement says.
No matter how much contortions Walmart/Scamazon/Newegg want to distance away from 3rd party sellers, they are endorsing the 3rd parties when they allow them on the site.
1. Allow this scammer on Walmart's platform.
2. Allow this scammer controlled access to Walmart finances
3. Allow the scammer to access the list of buyers of this scam coming from Walmart
Just because the actual item is a data-gobbling scam from another company, does not exonerate Walmart from enabling and furthering this fraud. And Walmart materially benefits from fraud, given their cut.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/M-2-Mini-Solid-State-Drive-High-S...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/M-2-Mini-Solid-State-Drive-High-S...
So I trust them, atm.
> Scammer gets two 512MB Flash drives. Or 1 gigabyte, or whatever. They then add hacked firmware that makes it misreport its size.
https://nitter.net/RayRedacted/status/1563021492157579264?re...
I don't understand why someone would release fake products like this. If you're going to sell a fake product, wouldn't you be better off sending like a functioning 0.5TB HDD, or sending a literal brick? Why would you send a fake product that causes data loss?
Unless you are the rare type who thoroughly tests all storage you buy before you use it, it is likely you would be backing up data to this and be blissfully unaware of what it is doing until much later, and even then it's likely you'll think of the drive as defective, rather than intentionally sold as fraudulent.
Making it look like it mostly works, enough to pass a 5-minute “is this a scam?” test probably even gets some legitimate users to write a 5-star “I can’t believe it’s true, but it is!” review.
So the answer to “why?” then is to make money with their scam and get as few refunds and returns as possible.
But I suppose the sellers has their scheme to avoid repayment anyway so it works anyway. It’s also a calculated and managed risk, so the marketplace don’t care anyway, either. It’s a cash wheelbarrow of moral.
You also automatically filter out the people that’d be smart enough to notice something was off.
I wasn't suggesting "sell a 0.5TB device honestly as a 0.5TB device", I was suggesting "sell a 0.5TB device claiming it is a 30TB device".
> You also automatically filter out the people that’d be smart enough to notice something was off.
You won't find a single "smart" person in the world that will buy a "30TB" disk for $30. So the smart people have already been filtered out in any case.
Is this an American version of the idiom? I've always heard it as "then it is", referring to the predicate... which I think sounds natural but now I'm wondering if that was just cultural.
But anyone with sense can immediately spot the patterns that show these to be scams (e.g. prices that are too good to be true and recent reviews that say these are scams). Therefore, it seems like automated scanning could eventually be tuned to catch and ban these sellers.
I think they also get away with this (and receive some good reviews) because the drives are too slow to ever fill up.
I wish these large retailers didn't allow these 3rd party sellers to pollute their listings.
I bet some Apple fans are giggling now.
E.g. from this week: https://9to5mac.com/2022/08/22/app-store-review-process-auth...
I’ll try this excuse next time I break a law, and see how far it gets me. “Your honor, keeping track of so many laws is just impossible to maintain!”
> The law automatically provides the second type of warranty, the implied warranty. Implied warranties are a part of all retail sales of new and used consumer goods. The retailer of an item implies that the item will work properly and be of average grade and quality, as long as it is used for the purpose it was sold. For example, a refrigerator will keep stuff cool as long as you are not trying to cool the entire room, and a blender will blend as long as you are not blending rocks.
If you’re selling a “30 TB Portable SSD” it has to store 30 TB of data, be portable, actually be an SSD, etc.
Stopping all comingling would be a good start. Known good products from known good sellers with known good supplier lines would allow buyers to drastically reduce the chance of getting a fake product.
This one threw me for a loop, at first. Wouldn’t one normally say “then it is” instead of “then it isn’t”?
I find I only trust things from the Apple store anymore myself. Markup and all.