Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam
kurtisknodel.com
kurtisknodel.com
In my case, the phony thumb drive I bought was delisted before I got home from the walk to the mailbox, literally.
But remember that Amazon keeps what's basically a social credit score on you that drops every time you return something, and then they permanently ban you (including from non-retail things like AWS and Prime Video) if it ever gets too low.
is there any example of this?
You lose access to your consumer Gmail, Drive, etc if your YouTube account gets banned for comments.
You lose access to your Epic Games dev account if you get banned from Fortnite (unless they decoupled this in last few years).
AWS used to be hard-linked to your Amazon shopping account back in the day (they can't separate them for you if you ask).
If there is a social credit score based on number of returned items I still haven't hit it.
In my personal experience a large volume of returns won't even get you banned. A USB drive is also low value so assuming you are correct then again the fear of returning a USB drive should be zero.
I mean, if you returned 287/602=48% of the items you ordered, either there is something wrong in what you order or - more likely - your supplier (Amazon) is not reliable.
On the other side, if 48% of items (particularly if low value ones) are returned, the costs of shipping/returning/handling must be enormous.
My point is that if someone like me can return almost half their items and Amazon doesn't care at all - then it's extremely unlikely the people are being banned from Amazon services for returning a USB drive.
As well another question is what is actually doing (or not doing) Amazon about the USB sticks/drives issues, the return rate of that should be something like 90% assuming that 5% of buyers fail to realize that the size is much smaller and - still say - another 5% buys them "for later use" and do not test them on arrival.
In a traditional brick and mortar store there would be someone monitoring the return rate for defects on any item for sale as - besides the loss of perceived reliability - there would be objectives costs for handling the returns.
Say its Wednesday night and I'm starting to design a project I'm doing over the weekend but I'm not done yet - and realize I will need 8mm shafts but not sure the length of my design. I just buy 3 or 4 versions of the product with the approximate length I may need and then end up just using the one my final design calls for and returning the others.
In a case like this, there is a problem with the customer, that's it.
I have 300ish orders per year, and not even 5% returns.
It's an incredibly wasteful way of shopping, it hurts the seller (which may not be Amazon itself), it hurts the environment, etc.
This includes some parts of fashion. You buy online. If it doesn't fit, you return and buy another. There are hobbies which are similar. You buy extra parts, and return what you don't use.
The price factors in the 50+% return rate. If they didn't allow returns, no one would buy.
I don't know if that's what OP is doing, but I'm not ready to judge unless I know it's not.
Still, since as you say these online sellers must calculate the prices of these goods to cover these return expenses, the other "normal" clients pay more and BTW there are thousands, millions packets going and returning (it is time, money, traffic, etc.).
Anecdotally, twice after periods of large purchases and high dollar amount of returns (because I was buying a lot of equipment and sometimes had to buy several of the same due to them coming faulty), I noticed same-day and next day shipping would disappear for a few months. I was never able to conclusively determine what the reason was though.
It's mostly targeted toward people who are egregious, and more importantly, lose Amazon money.
If you return a few too many DSLRs, Apple laptops or other high end gear you'll quickly find yourself on the rocks, or decide you're going to start a drop-shipping business from your Prime account or maybe you regularly put bricks in your returns instead of the actual products.
By comparison there is my friend. She shops a lot on Amazon but not a huge amount, maybe 15 items or so a month on average. She returns a lot of items, at least 20%, sometimes 50% or 100%. Far from banning her she routinely gets courtesy credits and outside policy refunds to keep her happy.
This is after she had actually been banned by Amazon, but not by retail. Instead, she spent 2+ years returning every since book she purchased for her Kindle, well over 100, when she realized she could buy a book and immediately return it, but turn off the Kindle internet connection while she finished reading it, before it was removed. They banned her from ever doing another Kindle return but she otherwise uses her Kindle normally.
> How do I know if I'm doing anything wrong?
>> ... that's proprietary
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/tiktok-trend-authors....
I recently dug into my property taxes and found I’m paying over $200/year (!) for the library. A lot more than the cost of Amazon Prime. Since I found this out, I’ve been using the library a lot more ..
As for our Amazon “customer score”, wish we could see it. I bet they have merchant scores too - would be interesting to see the number of returns per product displayed on each product page/merchant page.
You aren't, you are funding it. Anyone can use the library.
Doesn't this cause authors to actually lose money, so it's worse than straight up piracy for them?
The CBC did a writeup on this:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/tiktok-trend-authors....
Out of curiosity what goes through someones mind to think this is remotely acceptable?
Obviously by sharing this with you she sees nothing wrong/feels no remorse for what she does?
Blatant theft like this costs everyone money, why not just go to the library or something?
Copying data is not theft.
This clearly is retail fraud.
The greatest ThinkSpeak the media industry pulled was to redefine copyright, contract, and license violations as "theft" and "piracy."
Saying something is not theft/harassment/abuse/murder/etc. isn't the same as saying it's okay. Precise language matters.
It's not possible for someone to steal my chair or my wallet without harming me. Actual theft usually is not a victimless crime, by definition. In contrast, most of the people I've seen engage in copyright violation are too poor to buy what they're copying. Virtually everyone I know starts paying when they get real jobs. How do I feel about a broke high school student breaking my license? It's complicated, but much less bad than about someone stealing my phone.
Only if you are actively verifying the data. Im pretty sure most people would just look at a file listing and consider it stored.
I'm suggesting there is a significant risk, and anyone reasonable at Amazon would account for it. There's enough users (tech savvy, or heavy researchers as you point out, and ultimately some portion of casual customers) who will have a negative experience and potentially be skeptical of all purchases - major or minor. Amazon will certainly incur reputational and real return/handling costs.
It seems fairly implausible to me that Amazon would make the decision to say "Yeah, while tech savvy and discerning customers, and some portion of casual users will discover the scam, we just make so much money from fake thumb drives that it's worth it to destroy our reputation with that subset since a significant portion may not notice or ultimately associate Amazon with selling low quality products." All while we see the listings for these items get removed nearly as quickly as the pop up. Doesn't add up.
A fake (say) Gucci handbag is made with less premium materials, but only savvy consumers would notice once it arrived. You would not necessarily know from the product details on Amazon, but may have a clue based on price.
Whereas 1tb thumb drives have been sold for years now on Amazon and Wish and what-have-you but only recently did real 1TB thumb drives come into existence. Real Gucci bags have been around for decades.
Any 1tb drive which costs less than hundreds of dollars is fake. Full stop.
Why not just go to the source (aliexpress) and save the large margin in exchange for a longer wait time?
For a buck or two, I’m willing to take Amazon’s speed and easy returns.
So yes, you might get your $20 back, but who will restore the cost to nature?
Filter by country of seller? No. Filter by history/longevity of brand? No. Sort by recency of good reviews, or reviews since the last product change? No. Brand reputation, or per-brand reviews? No. Actual brand/seller contact information in the country you reside? No. Do they even require brands have company registration in the country, or are these total phantom stores?
So "it's difficult" for them but at the same time they've done nothing...
This means that the product you receive from seller X was probably not delivered to the warehouse by seller X, but would be part of a batch delivered by any other seller that uses Amazon fulfillment for that SKU.
This makes it impossible for them to punish the seller whenever a fake or defective product turns up for you if they had no detected it before it got into the pool.
It's not a difficult problem to solve at all, Amazon simply chooses not to solve it because the upside is profit and the downside is mostly reputational which is hard to convert to a number on a spreadsheet, so for business purposes it might as well not exist.
I just think it's important to point out it's how they chose to do it, presumably knowing the potential downsides, rather than some impossibility of warehouse operations.
IMO the current way of pooling things together is one way of spreading the loss (due to returns or A-to-z claims) across the entire pool. Other members of the pool bear the cost of such maleficence. Amazon's motto probably: Screw all sellers f**k if I care.
Sure they have a good return policy but who wants to deal with it or assume they’ll always honor it.
Restrict your search to USB drives that not only "Ship from" Amazon but that are "sold by" Amazon. In doing so, you will be weeding out all of the fraudulent devices that the article describes.
> Comingling means your strategy is not guaranteed to ensure you actually get what was described.
Commingling may be a problem in other contexts. But the article is about super-cheap "1TB" USB drives that don't really have 1TB capacity. If you restrict your search to "sold by Amazon" USB drives, you aren't at risk for buying these drives---because Amazon simply doesn't sell super-cheap 1TB USB drives. That's why commingling isn't a problem in this particular context.
If you walk into eg a Target, you can be pretty sure that everything in there except perhaps vitamins is a legit product.
No, this is true only in some countries. If there's no amazon store in your country you are in trouble.
If they refuse multiple times, hang up and call again.
All the while Amazon happily deletes bad reviews and pockets money.
Also I don't know what the internal politics are like at Amazon but it is inexplicable that these listings are present and top of the results for probably a year by my reckoning - fake drives are easily spotted by anyone who knows what current drive sizes and form factors are and in theory it there should be some friction to making a selling account so that you can't just keep re-listing the same fake products under infinite new names. Though that seems to be exactly what's happening.
Also bonus points, if it's a third party seller in my recent experience Amazon literally does not let me report a product as fake, only request refunds and replacements from said seller. When I finally used a LinkedIn contact to reach out to Amazon they told me to create a marketplace seller account to report copyright infringement - but that's only if I own the copyright lol.
- If I buy medicine, and it's fake, that's a serious problem.
- If I buy a bottle of vanilla, and it's tainted, that's a serious problem.
- If I buy a piece of electronics, and it's a piece which was returned for working intermittently, that's a problem too.
- If I buy clothing from brands I trust, and I get a knock-off which falls apart in 6 months, that's a problem.
Unless Amazon can get supply chain issues under control, it's too risky to buy most of the stuff I used to buy there. I find eBay and Aliexpress to be more reliable, probably due to reviews sticking to sellers.
I think it's a matter of time before someone starts selling ransomware on Amazon. You plug in a device, and your computer is compromised. The device is a buck cheaper.
2. USB: infect, report wrong size
3. Customer: returns USB drive
4: Amazon: restocks USB drive
Goto 1
Viewed on that way, there’s actually consumer harm, and maybe there’s an opening for an anti-trust case (which in the US requires proof of consumer harm).
I am not so sure about that. I think it’s a calculated risk, how many people will actually put in the time and effort to return the product and how many will just not care enough to go through the return process and just eat the cost.
They should do something about it if they care. They’re turning into a flea market and it seems their business plan (which doesn’t matter because AWS makes all the money) is to run out the clock and hope they put everyone out of business first.
They should stop allowing listing changes that completely change the product. They should allow specific vendors (probably at some cost) evade the SKU binning that co-mingles counterfeits with genuine products.
Fuck, they should issue a statement acknowledging the problem and tell us they’re trying to fix it before we abandon them.
That said, I had to buy an SD card recently and with all these scam products I went with the Amazon basics version since they’re the only seller of AB. Funny how that works…
Perhaps it is a healthy dose of old aged jadedness, but I have a habit of trying to avoid Sponsored items.
(Amazon will still return a duplicate result for the same product in the correct place further down the list so you're not missing out on anything by blocking sponsored search results)
It's kinda similar to apps paying to appear on their own search results' pages in the AppStore, to avoid having competitors take the spot.
Amazon took the return/refund almost a year after the sale. Ideal? No, but they took care of it.
Samsung paid for that ad.
The retail business overall is a scam. Example: I’ve been trying to find a comforter for a while, and I haven’t been happy with some of the options I found because a lot of other ecommerce sites have not great search experiences. I thought, well I can search Amazon for my preferences and buy it elsewhere. Nope, not even a single filter I applied was true for any search results I looked at. Amazon didn’t even try to serve me cotton comforters, much less any other refinements they offered.
They’re in the business of selling business. Whether that’s their logistics connecting suppliers and shipping with sales, or it’s their tech services connecting startups with time shares on a server.
I wouldn’t buy a USB drive or a blanket from IBM either. It’s the same thing.
Nobody ever got fired for buying a USB drive or a blanket from IBM.
So where do you buy your electronics from? Guess how the people who are making those are treated? Or is that okay since they are in another country?
I’m not sure what your point is. That I should buy from Amazon because factory workers in other countries are treated poorly? What would that do for those workers?
I’m not “clutching my pearls”, about anything. The first sentence of my first comment was meant—and only meant—as context for why my observations in the rest of that paragraph were a recent surprise rather than expecting my search would be fruitless. The rest of the paragraph, and the rest of the comment, could well stand on its own without that first sentence, apart from likely confusing readers about why I was window shopping on Amazon with the intent to buy products elsewhere.
The point of my comment was that Amazon’s interest in its consumer retail business is mostly in service of its other business pursuits, not a primary pursuit in itself.
My second comment clarifies that my ethical standards do apply to workers in developing countries, acknowledging that my available options as an individual electronics consumer are more limited, and that my choices are hypocritical nonetheless. I also alluded to other efforts I take to minimize my impact on those workers, but unless you’re one of those workers I don’t owe you an explanation of those efforts.
It’s possible I’ve misjudged your response, but my impression is that you’ve intentionally misinterpreted my clarification to bolster an argument that applying one’s personal values inconsistently is invalid. And there are several philosophical perspectives which would agree with that point or would at least raise the question. My philosophical perspective as applies to this thread is much more utilitarian: it’s better that I exercise my values incompletely thank not at all.
The reality is that the hypocrisy rebuttal to individual consumer choice tends to be used not to prompt more consistently good behavior, nor even to engage in thoughtful discussion about what a more moral framework of behavior would be. It’s used as a bludgeon to stifle discussion of one wrong by inserting it into a hierarchy of wrongs. In some of my past political circles, this was referred to as Oppression Olympics.
In those same circles, there’s another pertinent phrase: there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. The point of the phrase isn’t to excuse avoidable unethical behavior, but to acknowledge that some ethical behaviors are systemically unavailable to individual consumers.
The hypocrisy rebuttal demands, at least implicitly, either total asceticism or total nihilism. And it tends to encourage the latter because they’re equally ineffective and asceticism is more detrimental to any future prospects of becoming effective.
But like I said, it’s possible I’ve misunderstood your intent. If you’d like to recommend more ethical ways for me to buy electronics, I’m happy to engage further. Otherwise I’m done here.
In other words, even though many factory workers have alternatives, they are choosing the trade off to make $20/hour. They aren’t making the low wages that the factory workers where your electronics are made are. They are making more than many of the restaurants you probably go to. More than the retail stores you shop at and they made the choice using their own free will. Amazon distribution centers didn’t drive out local mom and pop stores.
It’s just seems strange of all the hills you die on standing in solidarity with factory workers who make more than the median income in the US is the one you choose.
For example, here are USB flash drives sorted by price-per-GB: https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=u...
I don't think we should share that stuff here on HN, it's a cancer on the web.
It's an LLC not a charity.
How about they follow the (GDPR and affiliate marketing and opt-in) rules like everyone else has to?
Affiliate links are indeed cancer, but that battle was lost years ago. Even reputable reviewers use affiliate links today.
I hate having a cheap, big usb drive that is slow as hell and breaks after 6 months.
Unfortunately, even the good rated ones are not always the same product. Recently I bought 2 Sandisk Ultra Flair USB3 (best price point / quality by far) and they both broke after 3 days of use - after looking it up it was revision 3.2 or something. Older revisions in my pocket still work very fast and reliable.
I would pay for a service that does HONEST reviews without affiliation :-)
I used to buy on Amazon when I wanted branded products with insurance. Opposite to buy on AliExpress, ebay, ... For some items.
But there are 2 very big problems:. Amazon mixing the stock of all the sellers selling the same thing. So, when you want something like a USB key or SSD, sdcards, even if the listing and the seller you are looking at looks legit, you don't know where the item will come from, it can easily be fake as it will not necessarily come from the stock of this seller.
Having to send back, be reimbursed, and reorder is not a solution. You loose a lot of time, and energy with stress. Maybe you needed that for a time sensitive usage.
Also, the second issue I noticed is that it is now very hard to find good branded products with Amazon search. It looks like that they are mostly Amazon owned brands or a few sponsored products that show up. But there is not anymore the large choice of products that you would expect. I noticed that when looking for a vacuum cleaner for example!
Do you have any source for this? This explanation is perfect to explain some friends about why they should be wary of buying electronics from Amazon
This. It seems well known brands have almost abandoned Amazon and low end consumer electronics altogether in some categories. A couple weeks ago I wanted to get a mains extension cable (power strip) with USB-C power connector for my phone. There wasn't a single brand I recognised apart from Belkin, who seemed not to sell any with USB-C (only USB3). The brand I opted for ended up being garbage (USB socket loose, general chintzy feel to something that will handle mains voltages and stay powered-on under my bed for years - no thanks).
I've recently started adding B&H to where I shop for electronics, alongside Amazon and a local brick&mortar (Microcenter). I no longer check Newegg much, though recently they did have the best price on a particular 1U chassis that I wanted. I'd welcome more direct-to-consumer sales from the brands themselves.
I hate buying USB or SD flash devices, because of all the counterfeits of brand names, and I'll never buy one of those spammy-semirandom-named products.
Tried them a couple of times and delivery was prompt and free! Highly recommend it.
I did have a poor experience recently with what I thought was D2C with another quality brand name. I thought I was buying server RAM from Micron (not marketplace), but shipping info looked like it might've been "some random guy's kitchen table moonlighting business", and they actually shipped non-ECC initially, even though the order was for ECC compatible with a particular mobo model. I hope Sandisk/WD does D2C better.
Nowadays I only buy products from brands / companies I know (and I do visit my local electronic stores to buy them). It's really hard to find a brand on Amazon that doesn't sound like its name wasn't generated :).
Regarding these scam listings: I wouldn't buy a usb stick from a brand like "pullheart", "kiknin", "probuk", or "generic" (I'm not making these names up).
Also: the biggest capacity for a usb stick Verbatim or Intenso offer is 256GB (Verbatim) or 512GB (Intenso). These companies have websites with product information.
I wrote a 1 star review last month on a scam product (I fell for) with obviously fake reviews (the product was an earplug, the 3000 5-star reviews was totally generic or for womens beauty creams). The review was rejected because it was violating Amazons "policy". The scam product itself and the 3000 fake reviews was fine.
This is why advertising on the web, social media platforms, etc, has a bunch of stuff you can and can’t do. Scam products are harder to police there and definitely happen, but a product in a web page or next to a tweet is less risky than a product in a list of products where they user has intention to buy one.
Amazon need to tread really carefully here. I know so many people who avoid eBay because of scams, it pretty much destroyed their reputation in the late 2000s, and Amazon is headed that way.
048d:1234 Integrated Technology Express, Inc. Chipsbank CBM2199 Flash Drive
It's probably a 128 Gb usb stick chip. I didn't open it to see the chips but after copying like 150 Gb of movies to it they started to randomly not open.
It was directly off aliexpress so the proud owner said he'll keep it to copy movies to it for when he goes on holiday. I guess for him it doesn't matter which 8 of 10 movies he watches.
In fact, for some of the things my partner orders (e.g. books from Taiwanese book shops) not only is there a shipping cost, but there are often surprise $20-$50 COD import duties on top of that cost, doubling the final cost of the order. That, for some reason, they can't just build into the order invoice. And because of the duties, the logistics provider (usually FedEx) usually refuses to actually do the last-mile delivery of the thing until they're paid; so we have to go down to their depot to pay the duties, effectively forcing us to do the last-mile part ourselves.
Also, even if a store were to offer free shipping at some price threshold (I think maybe some stores do for $100 here), I find that because most online other than Amazon aren't an "everything store", it's pretty unlikely that I'll be ordering more than a single item from them; and so I'd never qualify for the free shipping anyway. If I find a nice t-shirt, and it's $20... ain't getting free shipping from that.
The anecdote you mentioned would also apply in the States. Duty paid for purchases from abroad, like Taiwan. Also, much like Canada, you’d usually pay shipping for small mom-and-pop shop or boutique web stores too.
Import duties are set by the government of the importing country; Canada’s are pretty high compared to most countries, making a lot of online shopping with international shipping less worth it here than elsewhere.
Also, a fun fact: the US negotiated a sweetheart deal with the International Postal Union, such that sending parcels to the US from most countries is subsidized by the sending country’s government. So every country other than the US pays more than the US does to order from e.g. AliExpress.
Every item arriving 1 day early is worth $140/yr for most people. I've paid a lot more for a lot less (looks at Digi-Key order history)
Also Amazon Fresh (free 6 hour shipping in my location) is extremely convenient. A lot of sites charge $60 per order for the same service (overnight delivery)
Which is great marketing trick, because you are of course paying for delivery through inflated unit prices. A lot of things on Amazon are a few Euros more expensive than in other stores because they just hide the delivery fee in the unit price. There is no such thing as "free delivery", you are paying for it one way or another.
So you get a discount on the item you want, free shipping and Prime for a month for less than the normal cost of normal shipping, and it comes the next day. Free shipping without Prime only has a threshold of $39AUD too. It's pretty easy to game things in your favour to get a cheaper item and still get next day delivery.
What I'm trying to say is that often stores that don't offer free shipping are cheaper than Amazon and you should compare the total prices instead of just ordering from Amazon assuming that they are the cheapest. In my experience they sometimes are the cheapest, but in most cases they are not.
No, and I think that the incentives that arise from that model speak for themselves in what Amazon has become.
That is to say, I just don't think it's necessary to have an 'everything store' any longer because the competition has caught up.
Western Digital and Samsung definitely have their own web sales on their .com domain.
And I try (and often fail) to ask myself that if I don't "really care about it," do I really need it?
I sometimes buy Samsung storage from Samsung directly (they have an online store), and same for Western Digital, but when I'm not doing that I like Best Buy (for general consumer electronics).
For more specialist stuff (pro audio, etc) there's other stores.
Walmart is garbage for the same reason as Amazon. Unmoderated third-party sellers.
I’ve also found it useful to limit to only what’s available in my local Walmart.
Walmart isn’t perfect but their quality control is much higher. Oddly, their customer support is much better too. The last few times with Amazon the rep was like pulling teeth. They once asked me to mail back a $10 item so they could review its quality. It’s just a hassle that Id like to avoid by working with higher quality retailers.
I don’t think it’s a consumer cost issue either as Amazon isn’t cheapest. I think it’s just where they are choosing to make their money and they’ve shifted from innovation and market capture to rent seeking.
Much easier to not get scammed than Amazon with all those resellers with their fake reviews and endless ad budgets.
And if you got lied to you get your money back usually without even sending the item back. Customer service is top notch.
Not get me started on how many small packages got lost because of the German postal system. I rarely have issues from China and shipping can be as fast as 10 days sometimes.
Walmart somewhat if you search store or shipped and sold by Walmart.
I have to assume that Best Buy isn't commingling marketplace/first-party, however.
I ordered one of something and got a ten pack and it took me about an hour on the chat to get them to understand I wanted to send nine back. It was pretty expensive stuff so I’d’ve felt bad keeping the other nine but man it was getting tempting.
Years ago, a similar situation would result in a "keep the item we sent by mistake, and we'll dispatch the quantity you paid for." This behavior seemed to rely on human support personnel.
Now I run a full suite of tests on every storage device I get from Amazon (or anywhere else, for that matter).
I also use the software h2testw to check, if the drive / card is a fake or not as soon as I bought one.
https://www.costco.com/sandisk-nvme-1tb-extreme-portable-ssd...
Maybe the author is not a native English speaker? I saw “sponsored” and immediately knew it was an ad.
This was “Amazon’s Choice”
SanDisk 1TB Extreme PRO USB 3.2 Solid State Flash Drive - SDCZ880-1T00-GAM46 https://a.co/d/2hSvRQx
A product I assume is legitimate
Safari is doing the same: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rupu0y3wswxs2l2/validbutinvalid.pn...
Edit: nvm, enough of it works natively on mac
Or repeated rsync set to verify each block.
Feels like an inconvenience.
It would be a scam if half of the keys did nothing from the start.
As it is it's design in California inside an air conditioned and purified office. You're using the laptop wrong if you take it outside ;)
Source: I own one of those unusuable keyboards.
Same-ish with the USB drives, i.e. "You're using the usb drive wrong if you fill it to the max.". Both devices work for casual use, both look like they could handle more heavy use, both break sooner than expected.
And sure, it's not a serious comparison, but I still see a surprising amount of similarities.
Just return the product and write a review to help others rather than whining about something unrealistic didn’t happen.
Amazon makes a lot of money from selling sketchy products without QA, it's an explicit decision they have made. Other stores just don't sell that crap.