Google “Sponsered Products” in SSD Scam
On September 3rd, I did a Google search for “external SSD for mac”. The screen shot below shows the results.
Every single one of these “Sponsored Products” is a scam. External SSD drives are typically in the 1TB-4TB size range. A 1TB SSD will typically cost a few hundred dollars, with 4TB SSDs going for $500-$1000. 128TB SSDs are available, but are targetted at large data centre applictions and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Getting one for $64 is ludicrous.
Get Kevin McNamee’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I’ve known about these scam SSD devices for some time now. I bought one six months ago from a small, electronics shop in a local mall for $20. It was advertised as 1TB and I thought I’d found a real bargain. When I got it home and plugged it into a MacBook, sure enough it popped showing 1TB of space… great. Then I tried to use it by backing up some files to it. The backup process started very slowly and then simply stopped working. Nothing I tried could get it working again.
I Googled the product name and found a nice YouTube video that explained the scam. The scammers take tiny, cheap, SSD chip and hack the firmware to claim it is 1TB in size. I’d been had. Oh well it was only for $20.
I was shocked when I did the Google search recently and saw that four of the “Sponsored Products” were identical to the scam SSD device I bought, except the were now listed as 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and an incredible 128TB. The other two products are undoubtedly scams using different hardware. No one sells 1TB SSDs for $15 and the last one at $99 is from the same Web site as the 128TB scam. So every one of these “Sponsored Products” is a scam.
I have reported the issue to Google and they have promised to investigate. In the meantime, as a public service, I’m providing this warning on Medium. Don’t buy any SSDs labelled “Portable SSD Mobile Storage” and if the price seems to-good-to-be-true, it’s a scam. They are even selling them at Walmart now. Feel free to pass this on.
