His dad buys a new hard drive: it doesn’t work, he opens it and what he finds is hard, but not a disk

When a father brought home what seemed like a bargain-priced 20-terabyte hard drive, he didn’t expect to uncover one of the most bizarre tech scams circulating online. The device looked legitimate at first glance. Windows even recognized it. But nothing worked.

So he asked his son for help—and the truth hidden inside the enclosure was far stranger than a simple malfunction.

What was really inside the fake hard drive?

When the son opened the casing, he found no storage unit at all.Instead, six chunks of iron were glued inside to mimic the weight of a real hard drive. Next to them sat a tiny chip designed to fool Windows into detecting a nonexistent 20 TB drive.

There was no disk. No storage. Just metal weights and a cheap electronic trick.

Scams like this one have been popping up for years on major resale platforms: eBay, AliExpress, Vinted, Wallapop, and even Amazon’s marketplace. Fraudsters use low-cost hardware to mimic legitimate storage devices, making a computer believe it’s reading a massive-capacity drive when in reality, there’s nothing behind it.

Why these scams keep spreading online

The lure is obvious: who wouldn’t be tempted by a storage device offering “premium-level capacity” at an unbelievably low price?

That exact temptation is what cybercriminals rely on.

Some fake drives contain very small, low-quality memory chips. Others, like this one, offer no actual storage at all. Many buyers only discover the issue after the return window closes—or when they get curious enough to open the device.

To stay ahead of negative reviews, scammers often rely on fake ratings, polished profiles, or throwaway seller accounts that disappear and reappear under new names.

How to avoid falling for fake storage deals

This Reddit incident is yet another reminder of a simple truth: if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Cheap drives can fail, contain malware, or—like in this case—just be plastic shells filled with scrap metal. Before buying storage devices online:

• Check the seller’s transaction history carefully
• Compare the price with official retailers
• Read recent reviews, not just top-rated ones
• Avoid listings with suspiciously high capacities at unusually low prices

In an age where tech scams are getting more sophisticated, a few minutes of research can be the difference between scoring a real bargain and ending up with a useless hunk of glued-together metal.

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