(ed: Amazon reached out to us saying "Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We've passed this feedback along to the appropriate team on your behalf. Let us know if you have any further questions or concerns". 16 hours after the initial publication of this article, both items - and a few more are still listed on Amazon.com)
While compiling our list of the best Black Friday SSD deals, we came across a peach of a product.
The Sajiulas “16TB portable SSD external hard drive” (their description 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 is returnable until January 31, 2023, giving the customer plenty of time to find out that it is actually not a 16TB drive, let alone a 16TB solid state drive.
What's the catch?
A genuine external SSD from a recognized brand (2TB Samsung T7 Shield) sells for $149.99, which is, TB for TB, 10 times cheaper.
When 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 went very 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’s product and is the number one new release in the external hard drive category.
Both products have attracted hundreds of positive ratings and claim to have read write speeds of 500Mbps and 450Mbps respectively.
A closer look at the reviews reveals a worrying trend; a lot of the 5-star ones are for different products. One says, “I ordered a blue & a pink one, my brother loved his, helps him get a better grip of the remote since he is disabled, love it, thank you” and another one, “Really surprised how much liquid it holds without leaking”.
We didn't link to them to avoid giving them more publicity.
What is Amazon doing?
Amazon has been cracking down on counterfeit and fake products ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022.
The company recently revealed that it had seized more than 240,000 items in China in one operation, bringing its overall total of products seized and disposed of 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 selling accounts.
Regardless, there are still gaps in Amazon’s anti counterfeiting system that allows operators like Sajiulas and Wiota from selling bogus products to unsuspected customers.
TechRadar Pro has reached out to Amazon and will report back should we get any reply.
