Samsung and SanDisk can only manage 1TB and 2TB drives for that price so it is not surprising that every 16 TB SSD shipped at that price is a scam, even if they’re shipped by Amazon.

Josh Hendrickson — Editor-in-Chief of Review Geek — bought one of the “16TB SSDs” and tore it down to reveal a generic 64GB microSD card on a USB 2.0 card reader. Adrian Kingsley-Huges, writing for ZDNet in May 2022, found the same thing. Different packaging and different case colours, but the same trick.

It is not just Amazon either we tested one from a Facebook advert which came from Hong Kong and contained a USB thumb drive inside a larger casing. The drive did not work.

The reason they have good reviews is third-party sellers take old listings and replace them with new items, leaving the reviews but changing everything else.

A fake 16TB drive listing showed five-star reviews for laptop chargers, basketball backpacks, stickers, screen protectors, Mardi Gras beads, and mousepads. The sellers gather good reviews for cheap generic products, swap in a more expensive fake, and then take it down when bad reviews start piling up.

In 2019, an Amazon spokesperson told Consumer Reports they’d spent over $400 million to address the problem. It appears they still have not cracked it.