Scamming - Trending items

antispam246

I've noticed for awhile now that Hard disk drives, specifically of the 3/4TB nature have been used alot for scamming. Just a heads up.

Basically a popular item, with low price. The seller is most likely taking payment and closing up shop. Seen it happen alot lately and I can pick out several listings right now that fire off all the alarms,

examples

291185414221
331255678441
321455451909

All different sellers, but I guarantee you it's the same person.

forgotmyname

Whole batch of accounts setup on the 23rd October last year by the looks of it.

skylineboy2002

another hard drive scam doing the rounds is fake storage capaciry, esp on the usb thumb drives.

basically you think your buying a 64gb drive - reasonably expensive around £40 for decent make.

and when you plug it in, it reports to the pc that its 64gb or thereabouts, but actually its been programmed to say that and is only a couple of GB's - a fivers worth if that.

so they pocket the difference in value, and not many people know how its happened, and as the pc says 64gb or whatever, they think all is fine.

antispam246 wrote: »

I've noticed for awhile now that Hard disk drives, specifically of the 3/4TB nature have been used alot for scamming. Just a heads up.

Basically a popular item, with low price. The seller is most likely taking payment and closing up shop. Seen it happen alot lately and I can pick out several listings right now that fire off all the alarms,

examples

291185414221
331255678441
321455451909

All different sellers, but I guarantee you it's the same person.

verybigchris

skylineboy2002 wrote: »

another hard drive scam doing the rounds is fake storage capaciry, esp on the usb thumb drives.

basically you think your buying a 64gb drive - reasonably expensive around £40 for decent make.

and when you plug it in, it reports to the pc that its 64gb or thereabouts, but actually its been programmed to say that and is only a couple of GB's - a fivers worth if that.

so they pocket the difference in value, and not many people know how its happened, and as the pc says 64gb or whatever, they think all is fine.

A variation on that trick is to mount the dodgy flash drive in a portable hard drive case, along with some extra ballast, so the buyer thinks they've bought a real hard drive:

FidgitsID

I never buy hard disks or usb sticks from anyone except very well known companys, and even then I check they are what they claim to be ASAP.

Takes a bit of time to test, but worth doing because the time to find out the drive is fake is before you start using the drive, not when you cant read from the drive & lose data.

I use H2testw to check my usb sticks