The same scheme is very common on the market for "new" laptop batteries sold by Chinese retailers on for example eBay. The batteries will come with a reprogrammed charge cycle count of 0, an unlikely serial number of all-zeroes/ones/nines or 123456789 etc., and with about 50% of its marketed capacity.<p>As soon as you bring up a refund/warranty errand with the retailer they will offer a 50% discount for the battery in return for you not giving them a 1-star rating. Now you've still paid them for a bad battery, and you've helped keeping the systemic economic crime alive by not warning other customers.
<a href="https://archive.ph/2025.02.09-074637/https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Increasing-evidence-of-origin-in-China-10269059.html" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/2025.02.09-074637/https://www.heise.de/en...</a><p>As you cannot deny cookies without paying.
Wow. Heise takes #1 prize in most anal advertising consent form. Literally a individual reject button for every one of their billion individual ad partners and consent to advertising as a whole has only an Accept button.<p>At that point you may as well just cover the entire screen with a "Agree to anything" button
Frustratingly bad article about an interesting story. Has no one moved on the obvious step of checking the drives for deleted data to track down where they’ve come from?
Cannot read this article (requires subscription without allowing cookies), but have seen a couple of german stores mentioned in another one. Those are most likely small shops (just online or garage) which get the cheapest stuff they can and sell with some margin.
So I've had to idea to look at Alibaba, and voila: <a href="https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Seagate-Exos-ST16000NM001G-16TB-SATA-III_1601018895574.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Seagate-Exos-ST16000N...</a><p>That seems to be too cheap to be true.
loads for me, have cookies,java script, dom storage, off by default..add blockers on, I get just the text
which is just fine<p>still dont understand how a major disk maker got caught up in something as skeezy as this though
Are you new at technology? China is well known to produce counterfeit products.<p>Most of the time, they just resell products from factories who didn't pass the quality tests.