Recently, it has been seen that there have been many incidents where customers have purchased products from online stores, but have been cheated when buying these products at a much cheaper price than the original.
Such incidents are seen to occur not only in the local market, but are also seen as a global problem that has plagued many buyers who thought they had gotten a good deal.
Recently, it has been reported that leading storage component manufacturer, Seagate has collaborated with the Malaysian government, specifically the Ministry of Domestic Trade to dismantle a storage resale syndicate that is currently taking place in the country.
Seagate, through their security teams operating in Malaysia and Singapore, have discovered a location outside Kuala Lumpur that appears to have been “recycling” hard drives that were previously used to mine the “Chia” cryptocurrency originating from China.
These hard drives were found to have been used for mining activities, and after they were no longer profitable, they were sent to Malaysia to be reset and sold at a cheaper price than the market. The issue here is that these hard drives are marketed as new and never used hard drives, but it turns out that what has happened is that they have only been reset, and the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) data has been erased.
SMART will usually record the amount of use of a hard drive to determine the level of “health” of a storage, even if the data contained has been erased.
Apart from hard drives from Seagate, storage components from other brands such as Toshiba and Western Digital have also been found. And to make matters worse, they have also found that there are storages that have been labeled as more expensive types of storage for sale.
For example, a regular computer hard drive has been labeled as being used for other digital storage such as NAS storage or for surveillance purposes, which are usually sold at a higher price.
Although the location of the operation of the syndicate "refreshing" digital storage has been discovered, Seagate security and the KPDN are still searching for the mastermind behind this syndicate, as all the employees arrested are only subordinates.
To address the problem of reselling this storage, Seagate has also reportedly updated their partner program to ensure that Seagate customers only purchase storage from authorized distributors and sellers certified by Seagate itself.