Amazon... more like SCAMazon - Fake SSDs

Have you purchased a “scam” product from Amazon before? How did your experience go? Let us know below!
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Amazon tip: avoid product brands that sound like cans thrown down the stairs.

They should add a public changelog to product listings so you can see if the seller "updated to reflect color change" or "updated from socks to hard drives"

As someone who is hard of hearing and relies on lip reading a fair bit, I’m REALLY thankful to the editing staff for putting CC for someone speaking off screen. I’d never understand it otherwise.

I was suspicious of these merged reviews years ago because I had seen them and they made no sense, and basically nobody believed me, saying "that wouldn't happen on Amazon".
Yeah it does. It has done for years and they aren't even TRYING to stop it.

A possible solution for “listing merging” could be to make sure that it stays in the same category, and if it changes too much after merging, disable it until reviewed by some human or software.

I don't use Amazon nearly as much as I did years ago. Even if you pay a little more, the peace of mind you get when buying in a reputable store makes it worth it.

Making it impossible to switch the product category might be one way to at least make it way harder to review merge, especially in the tech space.

This is an important video Linus. Although the topic is not new, the solution to undermining scammers is education of customers. When customers stop buying - because they know what they are looking at, the scammers will stop scamming.

That first one is pretty devious all things considered. The fact that it won't "fill" but instead just keeps writing by deleting old data is the kind of thing that would catch a lot of people off-guard. Anybody using it as a superfluous backup or extra storage that they never really look at or pay attention to wouldn't even know they were potentially losing data with each new write process.... I'm always split on scam products; they do suck, but people should know better....but they do suck :P

My favorite thing about these products are the generally off topic reviews and sometimes askew lettering on the case.
My brothers friend fell for one of these scams around two months ago but was refunded a few days later. The worst part is that the same scam is still for sale on amazon.

Amazon really needs to do something about it. Like a few months ago I was like "Eh, I could use another SSD", checked Amazon, saw tons of obvious scams, and then went "I don't feel like trying to navigate getting a good deal vs avoiding any subtle scams, I'm just not going to bother."

They could make the criteria for becoming a seller higher. If your name is similar to a banned seller then it should be put to a review. They can also automate comparing a products page to before and after. If it uses completely different description and picture, it's probably not the same product anymore.

Compared to what my level of consumer confidence was with Amazon, say 5 years ago- I think it's fair to say it's plummeted for me compared to today. I basically treat it like ebay now. I still use them for items that are just too hard to track down otherwise (parts for my old pressure washer, etc) and stuff I really don't care if it's higher quality because it's relatively inexpensive (like a 4 pack of smart home outlet plugs). When I do want above average quality- for example, I have plenty of "average" quality padded cycling shorts, I wanted some GOOD ones- I generally won't even bother to check on Amazon. They are still good at getting stuff to you quick, but there are is a long list of things, some little, some big- that are a massive drop in the customer experience for me and seem to be getting worse.

this was very informative and answered questions I'd had about fake Amazon sellers for awhile. thank you guys for the research and explanations

In the case of product merging, it seems like low-hanging fruit for Amazon to be like "you can't just change category from Apparel to Electronics" in your sock example.

Awesome video with great in-depth explanations! Thank you Linus & Team!

I think the only thing Amazon need to restrict when it comes to adjusting product listings is the category of the product. They don't need to stop it outright but I think it should require a manual review. That way, someone at Amazon can see that the sock listing has suddenly become something else.

This is Amazons biggest issue. I see myself avoiding Amazon because it becomes more and more like Wish or Alibaba.

Thanks. Even for some of us tech capable types, there's a few good nuggets in there about what to watch out for. I also appreciated the description of the scammer's methodology.

This was a really good informative video. I have ran into a product like that before where the reviews was for something else entirely and was so confused.

I actually work at an Amazon warehouse and have picked a couple of those exact scam products. I knew they were fake when I saw them but I can see how someone who isn't into tech like I am, could get fooled. I hope those people got their refunds quickly and without issue.

So I will say those weird brand names aren't necessarily a problem: some legitimately decent products also have those strange brand names. For instance I recently got an activated charcoal air filter + essential oil diffuser with a brand called "PARTU". I then later saw the exact same air filter with a different trademark. It was cheap, but it does the job I expected it to (it's a fan and a filter in a plastic shell, not exactly rocket science). I think sometimes it's just as likely they're using the weird branding because they're a small distributor for a white labeled product. If you're particularly good at deal finding: sometimes you can find decent HDR monitors that other companies mark up even though it's the same factory.

I always/frequently check Amazon reviews, even for products I'll buy elsewhere (like at Costco, or another online retailer). I've seen OBVIOUS cases of this "review merger" thing--always wondered if it was a technical mix-up, or something deliberately more nefarious...

I see this all the time on Amazon. We need people like Linus to help the consumers distinguish between the rights and the wrongs.

Great video. Better than a lot of a journalist work being done nowadays. This kind of stuff is interesting to learn

I sincerely enjoyed and appriciate the fact that you take the time to breakdown and explain to people how things work and not only that but show examples and reasons of how to and how not to do things. I always knew something wasnt right from the reviews on amazon on things too good to be true but also shows how far people go to take your money. Thanks for the information Linus Tech!!!

It seems like the fix for the edit hack would be to restrict the scope of edits that can be made at one time. Like, only allow 20% of the text of the product listing to be edited within a week. That allows for corrections, but prevents wholesale swapping out the listing.

Amazon needs to make any changes to product pages publicly visible on and require the seller to list the reason for all edits.

It's kind of sad to see how Amazon slowly deteriorates into a platform for scammers.

My sibling complained that I spent too much money when I purchased my parents an SSD for their photos. The same sibling owns a fake SSD 🤦‍♀️

Thank you for taking the time to make this public service announcement. I use HC-05 Bluetooth modules in bulk and the failure rate is over 50% now - and the number of crazy named sellers has grown exponentially. It's disheartening and sad.

Thank you for drawing attention to this, it's a massive problem. It's predatory and takes advantage of mainstream consumers.

Always appreciate your content!
I'm pretty tech savvy, but I'm tempted by sketchy knock-off tech. What I notice that the numbers of capacity tend to be fudged as Linus indicated. But, when you figure out the pricing patterns, then you can still get an ok dea; (MAYBE).
The reason why: My theory: Chinese dumping of old gen tech into the West (yay, supply surplus!), but also for things that fail Q/A. For me, this applies to SDDs, SD cards, and USB keys. They sell storage chips with bad sectors for cheap, but then you have to do the math to see if this is effective risk.

I think they should really work on the return policy. Longer return policy for quickly or most recently uploaded items. Maybe even hold on the cash for more than 30-days so if the customer thinks it’s a scam Amazon directly can process the return. After a certain window amazon sellers will be off this probationary period

Yeah, I always hated the fake troubleshooting tactic when they ask if you updated your drivers or your system. It's Windows 10! How could I NOT update? It does it automatically!

Amazon Prime is starting to become a joke - searching for everyday products like a fan is a tricky task. You’ll find a dozen fans with the exact same design but with a different brand name.
Amazon is taking us all for a ride here

Amazon also refuses to put up negative reviews about products. They usually say the review did not meet its guidelines or some nonsense.

Idea for Amazon: they should just put up ads on the site that tell/push people to leave bad reviews on fake products and to look at the reviews more carefully to make more people aware of the fake products.

I actually bought that 16TB. I really only needed a 2TB and it was too tempted to not figure out what the scam was. When you open it in disk management there's a partition for most of the storage that is completely fake. Honestly I wouldn't have minded it but it broke when I tried to format it. Also didn't know about the connector... the speed makes sense now.

Great video, such a shame more people are not privy to what is actually going on! Big Thanks.

Love how they are calling out on their own screwdriver. Good on them

Amazon doesn't let us easily report product. If they make it easier we could shut down those scammers easier.

Your a good man with a big heart zack and ya hope he and his colleagues find a better business always know if its too good to be true it usually is

I’ve been scammed several times on Amazon. The worst part for me is that I’m disabled so getting out of the house to return anything is nearly impossible (if it weren’t for the fact that I suffer the process of breathing in Indiana it wouldn’t be the colossal task it is - Indiana hates for the fun of it). I end up stuck with misrepresented and truly fake.

That's why friends and family go through me when wanting to be told what to get electronic wise...sadly even high end electronics scam you with insanely high prices just because they have a "brand name" you should cover that too.

My father was paid a full refund for leaving a 5-star review on a PSU... the PSU was actually as advertised and still holds up after two years, so he basically left a review he was already planning on leaving... was an interesting case imo

I know about cammers, but damn you point it out so well! Superb video about the ins and outs and how they work! ...and how people get ripped off

Amazon can fix this by not allowing sellers to change the category of listed items, mainly when they have already been broadly sold. They can go even further in this and remove the ability to change titles when passed a certain length of time. Or they can keep older versions of the same item so buyers can go through what has been changed and what has not.

I always wondered why the heck that happened with listings showing reviews for another product entirely. I thought maybe it was an error an avoided the products where it occurred. It seems like a huge oversight to allow anyone to use the same listing reviews when it's not even the some product..

You came off lightly, I bought one for a fair price that didn’t promise anything crazy. And I just got the controller for the storage and the box for it. But no actually storage 😂

if i think a little outside the box, a disk that deletes old data when in full capacity would be an excelent product in some case scenarios as it ensures the writing of the file

I’d say I think for editing the product page it should be similar to getting verified on twitter before you could pay as in if you are actively updating a product they can request to get verified and this prevents scammers because the Amazon employee or Smth can sniff through and probably figure out it’s a scam thus making sure this doesn’t show up at all

Late to this but Amazon seems to be leaning into their new Alibaba-esq illegitimacy. I used to be able to filter by seller easily, for any product. It was by far the easiest way to avoid scammers. Now, Amazon hides the feature on the majority of their searches. Why?

Amazon has gotten so dodgy. I can’t even find the legitimate name brands anymore on many product types. I’ve been spending less on Amazon because it’s gotten frustrating

I bought a graphite crucible that looked like it was the size of a coffee cup,but when I got it,it was more like a 2 ounce crucible, not 8 ounce.

Jeffe retired (he came back briefly during the pandemic) and Amazon hasn't been the same since Andy and the corporate dweebs have taken over. What bothers me most about scamming customers is they don't get it. Sears Roebuck was the Amazon of the 19th & 20th centuries and they died a horrible death because of terrible customer service and replacing quality with crap. So thank you for posting these videos and remember, "Buyer Beware". I do wish Amazon would try harder policing their website!

One solution Amazon could do, is they already email you to rate / review / answer questions on something you purchased. So if they seller changes / updates their product ask those same people to just give it a quick verify that it's the same product. If a product is getting a lot of reports it's not the same product. There is probably an issue.

I only ever buy storage from physical retail stores and use brand names. Told my mom to do the same thing. It’s also more convenient to get a drive that same day instead of waiting for 2-day shipping. Telling her that these things are fake did help.

These scam vids are sooo needed in the world right now. Thanks for taking days off from reviewing 5 figure builds to help us poor smucks keep our last two bucks.

This is by far the best LTT video I have seen in at least a year !!
very informative and easy for the average person to understand.
I hate Scammers, and love making their days bad.

Amazon just needs to support showing versions of product updates for a user to check, then you will see if it was merged or just minor changes

I like how Linus just literally told us how to scam people :)

I bought my Johnson on Amazon. Was described as 14” massive king size dongle and it turned out to be a 2” micro dongle

Stuff like this is why I always filter reviews by worst^ then I get an idea of what people are actually complaining about and what the real weaknesses of the product are. If inconclusive you move up to the highest and balance it out.

Starting to love Adam for all the little skits he did in this video. Keep up all the good work Adam! ☺

Please remember that returning a product is your greatest strength with Amazon. If you must issue a chargeback-and I wouldn’t recommend going that route with Amazon-use the option “product not as described”. This is useful with other vendors.

You can absolutely restrict product revisions. Prevent category switching is the easiest fix ever. Most of these product merges are using easier categories (as said in the video) and if you prevent category swapping you prevent the vast majority of these scams. That alone would reduce the number of scams by leaps and bounds.

One of the more terrifying parts of this is that contrary to popular belief these operations will often have massive financial backings with organised crime. Not only do these listings generate income for some really bad people but they can often be used for money laundering and even black market dealing.

What if amazon did a rating system similar to that of steam reviews? Such that all of the reviews still exist but you can see recent ones (some default time frame or sense last "edit") as the default . That way you could compare easier but still have all of the overall reviews.

Shopping online has become a pain in the ass. Not just tech stuff, but anything really. Unless it's a field I am familiar with, I really struggle to spot ALL the fakes. Especially on the German Amazon store these Chinese sellers sometimes have German, almost traditional sounding names. It's then the product description in the ever-repeating pattern with terrible German that gives it away, but it's wasting SO much time. And sadly more and more platforms turn into marketplaces instead of handpicking items to list for sale.

This does make me wonder, a few years ago I bought a 250gb ssd for like 20 bucks, when I got it, it only had 128gbs, but it showed me on the devices and drives menu when I clicked my pc, did they just forget to change the firmware? Or was it a legitimate mix up? If they made it say 250gb, I never would have noticed since I just use my ssd to run windows

I think the biggest problem is that Amazon pretends to be a "safe" site, when it just isn't. Ebay isn't perfect, but at least it emphasizes that sellers could be any random people and you might want to look at their reviews to see if they can be trusted. Amazon does list sellers and have seller reviews, but it's very de-emphasized, particularly the difference between "sold by Amazon" and "fulfilled by Amazon". Despite the fact the latter may be a counterfeit, fraud, and possibly genuinely dangerous.
Or I see a review that says someone got a counterfeit... but the reviews don't show what seller someone bought it from, so does this tell me anything relevant, or do I just need to avoid buying anything from any third party seller I don't specifically know to trust?

They could make it so that a relisted item keeps it's previous category thus in the sock example there'd be an ssd in the sock area. But then again they might find a way around it...

I love how he transitioned from saying if it's too good to be true then it's probably a scam and then goes straight to the square space sponsor lmao

Linus does a outstanding job compressing his videos. My laptop screen views everything in 1080p. But with Linus videos I can watch them at 1440p level!

Amazon might be able to use AI/machine learning to determine if page edits are too significant, then if the AI flags it, send it to a human reviewer to quickly determine if they're reusing a page for a scam. I think AI has gotten good enough that it can determine between a listing for a book and a listing for an SSD.

Amazon is one thing, but it's way more entertaining and suspenseful buying on Wish. I tried a few cheapo high-capacity USB drives a while back with hilarious results. Fortunately, they made refunds super easy. Once I got a small metal ring with some sort of bird on it, once was a decorative sticker to go around the fingerprint sensor on a phone, and another was an empty aluminum shell of a thumb drive. The few SD cards that actually did arrive were ~32MB and they couldn't even quality print the label. Got to figure the model number was 32MB, or 16TB or whatever.

"I and you have the obvious knowledge"
Putting a lot of faith in me Linus

Amazon have been doing this for a full on decade now, I assume in every category to some extent, but absolutely blatantly with digital memory of all forms.

I actually DID get a huge discount on a 10 TB portable hard drive because people complained it made noise. Ended up paying around $100 for it.
Turned out the reviews were right though. I does make a slight scratching noise when writing large files to it. But really that was it. Credit where credit is due, but thanks for making amazon discount a seagate product. :D

I want to ask, what would the legitimate purpose be for a seller to change the entire category for a listing be? The only thing I can think of is if the seller wants to change to a very closely related category that gets more traffic, etc, but it seems like a niche case at best. I would say that two easy things to combat this tactic would be to either make it so a product can only be changed to one in a closely related category or make it so major things like this need to be approved by amazon in order to update the listing.

When Linus popped it open and we saw those oval holes, my first thought, " ...that's a socket cover for a house."

One technique that won't find all the "deals," but will minimize the scams is if you only pick the items available for Prime delivery. Items delivered directly from Amazon have a fairly simple return process as well.

For years now, I've been wondering why Amazon hasn't copied eBay already and added a country filter to their search engine. That helps massively when filtering knockoff and scam products out if you already know what you're searching for.

at the very least amazon should prevent editing products from changing the category, like going from clothing (like the example of socks) to electronics, so that it would be harder for scammers to get fake reviews through the review merging system

absolutely insane to me that amazon hasn't cracked down on review merging. How hard is it to flag when a product's details have been significantly changed? Correcting typos, adding new advice or even updating a few lines of the description is one thing; replacing every photo and renaming the product entirely should be simple to detect and in fact social media apps have such mechanisms already.

I bought a 16TB M.2 drive on amazon it had 2 micro SSD that you use in digital cameras and cell phones lol. I just counted it as $70 mistake and but a SanDisk 2TB Extreme Portable SSD.

This kind of scam runs rampant on ebay as well, shocks me that these companies do little to nothing to stop it.

Making it clear and obvious that a product has had changes to its product page and having the ability to see what was changed could help significantly I would think, shouldn't hurt real products but would be a lot harder for the scammers.

What's the reason why Amazon allows for product page edits? Sounds like the most obvious way to scam, but also so easy to prevent.

your "its cheaper to compensate the customer" comment is spot on. i work in logistics and have dealings with amazon, as far as there deliveirs to customers go, the dont mind couriers leaving parcels on door steps etc as the figures show great delivery success rates. Then when it comes to peoples parcels going missing the say its cheaper to just replace the parcel than it is to investigate the delivery / courier and find out what actually happened to the original parcel

Linus is definitely having more fun now, since the last company changes

My gf's dad bought one of those 16TB drives literally today. He was trying to convince me its real. Thanks for saving me the trouble of explaining it

Several years ago I had purchased a CF card and on opening I saw only one memory chip was populated of the possible two. The capacity was half the advertised.

i am a technology noob, this channel has taught me all i know… wanted to say thank you ❤

This video format is one of my favorites. Makes me feel like I'm hanging out with Linus face-to-face, and it is quite hilarious to crack these products open and see the absolute *crap* they have for internals.

Linus, I am following you for years.. you work hard for content. I love it. Make it a little bit short. I have the same disease as you to explain in super detail. That's why students gets bored of my over explanation while loving my class content. Love your work.

I heard about you from Austin Evans. And as a medium level techy, I was always curious. Then you came up in my recommended...and I decided to watch. And I definitely don't regret it. This channel is literally all about tech tips which jeeps me out alot to eventually become a bigger techy

gotta love it how those scams keep on coming back in slightly altered form