- Nearly 700 counterfeit Seagate -Hard Disks were seized in a large Malaysian raid
- Forgerians converted desktop HDDs to false surveillance drives to profit
- Thousands of dollars were generated monthly through counterfeit hard drive sales
A large -scale raid in Malaysia has revealed the extent of manipulation in the hard disk market.
Seagate, who worked with the Ministry of Domestic Trade, tracked suspicious online offers to a warehouse near Kuala Lumpur.
Raidet revealed a forgery workshop that not only handled its own hard drives, but also those from Western Digital and Toshiba.
Discovering changed storage devices
This is not the first time old Seagate HDDs have been changed and sold as new. The Chia Cryptocurrency and other reports show that Seagate drives are susceptible to forgery.
In this latest case, nearly 700 Seagate devices, some with capacities reaching 18TB, were seized.
Evidence suggests that devices were taken from the secondary market, scrubbed clean, equipped with new brands and then sold as if they were fresh from the factory.
A striking case involved a desktop HDD that was transformed into a so -called “new” monitoring of HDD, which highlighted the misleading practice used.
The operation emerged when a sales manager noticed unusually low prices for e-commerce sites such as Lazada and Shopee.
Further examination showed that the scammers reset smart values to mask the age and use of the drives.
The reports show that sales volume was large where thousands of us dollars were generated every month.
Many of these products were listed as high capacity options, making them attractive to customers seeking affordable storage, whether in desktop systems, portable HDD setups or NAS HDD configurations.
Seagate believes that the used equipment may have origin in China, although the tracking of the exact supply chain remains difficult.
The challenge now lies in finding out how big the network is and who is ultimately responsible for channeling used parts to counterfeit goods.
The raid shows that organized groups are able to reshape the appearance of drives, so effectively that unsuspecting buyers may only be aware that the problem when errors occur.
In response, Seagate has strengthened its partner program and demanded that distributors undertake solely to buy from authorized suppliers.
Global trading screening is highlighted as a mechanism to block purchases from companies that appear on sanctions lists.
These steps are designed to reduce the chances of counterfeit drives coming into legitimate markets, though it is left to see if this will make a lasting difference.
The discovery is not isolated. Other brands have been affected, as shown by counterfeit unions external units circulating in Amazon’s marketplace without effective intervention.
Despite warnings, sales continued and this shows how poros the global distribution chain has become.
For buyers remain the risks associated with unusually cheap lists and unless enforcement intensifies, forged units may continue to slip through uncontrolled channels.
Via computer base (originally in German)
