HDD Scam on Amazon

[klart]

I’m not expecting any resolution or anything else to really come from this. I just want to do at least a little bit of naming and shaming of Amazon for their protection of scammers and apparent hostility to their customers.

 

The story started when I came across a pretty good deal for Seagate Exos X16 16TB HDD on Amazon. It was a 3rd party seller, but “fulfilled by Amazon”, which I still considered fine. I snapped up 2 of them, as I was planning to upgrade my NAS, which already had a bunch of this exact drive.

 

When the drives came, I’ve already hit the roof a bit, as they came in a large cardboard envelope, without any padding what so ever. This almost made me return them right away. But, as I am an IT professional and do know that HDDs are fairly shock resistant even in operation, much more so when off. So I’ve just put them aside. Probably because of this issue, I didn’t even look very close at the drives themselves. Also, as the picture shows, the seller was very intentional about the placement of the warehouse ID sticker.

 

Several months later, when I had everything together to upgrade my NAS, pulling these drives from the drawer, I notice that they are actually Seagate Enterprise Capacity 12TB drives. My disks are in a RAID-Z in my NAS, so of course drives that are smaller can not go into the array. As the return window was already long closed, I didn’t have much hope for any help from Amazon. But I still asked them, if they could do anything for me. To my surprise, on a support chat, laying out my problem, the support agent just said: “No problem, I’m creating a return label for you, you can send the drives back for a full refund”. I would have perfectly understood if they said: “The return window closed ages ago, we can’t help you”.

 

Suddenly it seemed like the whole problem could still be resolved and there would be no lasting issue. Instead, this is where things have really gone off the rails. After Amazon received the drives and processed them, I get an email saying “You sent the wrong thing back. You have been doing too many returns. We are disposing of the items you sent and refusing your refund.” That’s just a hair from accusing me of wanting to defraud them. And of course, them keeping those drives, is just straight up theft. If they refuse them, they should just return them to me. With all the trade wars, now even the 12TB drives are worth as much as the 16TB ones were last year.

 

Since then, I’ve been writing, trying to escalate, file complaints. Nothing. They enabled the scam of the 3rd party seller and to “resolve” the problem, they now stole the evidence too. Meaning also, that they kept both my money and the product in the end. So they only made it much worse. If I was left with the wrong drives, I could have still sold them or maybe used them in some other system. Their theft of the drives makes it way worse.

 

To top it all off, after writing an item review, that was rejected, because you can’t publish a review that refers to “Sellers,Delivery,Packaging, Pricing, Availability”. Sure, if something was a generic item, with many buying options, this could even make sense. But this specific one is a dedicated and specific listing of this one seller. So trying to warn other potential buyers about this seller being a scammer, should be more than allowed. Instead, Amazon protects the scam seller.

 

Obviously, this is very unlikely to have been something that anybody planned to work out in this exact way. It’s more like stacking failures resulting from the ultra efficient and rigidly regulated procedures, which just can’t deal with an exception. Amazon probably doesn’t explicitly want scam sellers. They probably just don’t care about them being there. Number goes up, even if the sales are scams. And of course support is really difficult to reach, have to navigate all kinds of dark patterns to be able to speak to anybody. Support agents are just an expense without any direct revenue generation. So support is nerfed.

 

Maybe the most shocking part is, that there doesn’t seem to be anything like a support ticket. Every support person I reach, starts from scratch, can only see my order history and my return status, can’t seem to have access to any record of my previous dealings with previous support agents. After at least 5-6 contacts now, each time I have to explain the whole story from that start and each time I get a different answer. Once they say they are escalating. And other time I was told, that I just needed to wait 2 weeks and they would do a “manual refund” for me, whatever that is. Then I was told they were appealing it. Nothing actually happens. Just keep coming back to “wrong item, no refund”.

 

The listing was: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07XM9RM95

And the seller was: Mysello GmbH

 

Even if I somehow manage to beat the refund out of Amazon, I’m definitely not buying anything from them ever again. Certainly not in Europe. And I have been quite a regular Amazon shopper since 2012. Unlike their claim, I made very few returns, had very few complaints. But of course, them stealing 400 Euros from me, does ruin the trust.

[Levent]

Every single Seagate HDD is being scammed ever since late 2023. I got burned with fake Ironwolfs this year as well. I will avoid Seagate drives no matter who sells them from now on.

[klart]

7 minutes ago, Levent said:

Every single Seagate HDD is being scammed ever since late 2023. I got burned with fake Ironwolfs this year as well. I will avoid Seagate drives no matter who sells them from now on.

I don't think it's Seagate's fault if some sellers run scams. I am more than happy with my Exos drives.

Once I thought I had sorted the refund, I ordered Exos X18 16TB drives from a local web shop with fast shipping and completed my NAS upgrade. (Though the model or revision number being so similar to the capacity in TB, that is dumb )

[Blue4130]

48 minutes ago, klart said:

I’m not expecting any resolution or anything else to really come from this. I just want to do at least a little bit of naming and shaming of Amazon for their protection of scammers and apparent hostility to their customers.

 

The story started when I came across a pretty good deal for Seagate Exos X16 16TB HDD on Amazon. It was a 3rd party seller, but “fulfilled by Amazon”, which I still considered fine. I snapped up 2 of them, as I was planning to upgrade my NAS, which already had a bunch of this exact drive.

 

When the drives came, I’ve already hit the roof a bit, as they came in a large cardboard envelope, without any padding what so ever. This almost made me return them right away. But, as I am an IT professional and do know that HDDs are fairly shock resistant even in operation, much more so when off. So I’ve just put them aside. Probably because of this issue, I didn’t even look very close at the drives themselves. Also, as the picture shows, the seller was very intentional about the placement of the warehouse ID sticker.

 

Several months later, when I had everything together to upgrade my NAS, pulling these drives from the drawer, I notice that they are actually Seagate Enterprise Capacity 12TB drives. My disks are in a RAID-Z in my NAS, so of course drives that are smaller can not go into the array. As the return window was already long closed, I didn’t have much hope for any help from Amazon. But I still asked them, if they could do anything for me. To my surprise, on a support chat, laying out my problem, the support agent just said: “No problem, I’m creating a return label for you, you can send the drives back for a full refund”. I would have perfectly understood if they said: “The return window closed ages ago, we can’t help you”.

 

Suddenly it seemed like the whole problem could still be resolved and there would be no lasting issue. Instead, this is where things have really gone off the rails. After Amazon received the drives and processed them, I get an email saying “You sent the wrong thing back. You have been doing too many returns. We are disposing of the items you sent and refusing your refund.” That’s just a hair from accusing me of wanting to defraud them. And of course, them keeping those drives, is just straight up theft. If they refuse them, they should just return them to me. With all the trade wars, now even the 12TB drives are worth as much as the 16TB ones were last year.

 

Since then, I’ve been writing, trying to escalate, file complaints. Nothing. They enabled the scam of the 3rd party seller and to “resolve” the problem, they now stole the evidence too. Meaning also, that they kept both my money and the product in the end. So they only made it much worse. If I was left with the wrong drives, I could have still sold them or maybe used them in some other system. Their theft of the drives makes it way worse.

 

To top it all off, after writing an item review, that was rejected, because you can’t publish a review that refers to “Sellers,Delivery,Packaging, Pricing, Availability”. Sure, if something was a generic item, with many buying options, this could even make sense. But this specific one is a dedicated and specific listing of this one seller. So trying to warn other potential buyers about this seller being a scammer, should be more than allowed. Instead, Amazon protects the scam seller.

 

Obviously, this is very unlikely to have been something that anybody planned to work out in this exact way. It’s more like stacking failures resulting from the ultra efficient and rigidly regulated procedures, which just can’t deal with an exception. Amazon probably doesn’t explicitly want scam sellers. They probably just don’t care about them being there. Number goes up, even if the sales are scams. And of course support is really difficult to reach, have to navigate all kinds of dark patterns to be able to speak to anybody. Support agents are just an expense without any direct revenue generation. So support is nerfed.

 

Maybe the most shocking part is, that there doesn’t seem to be anything like a support ticket. Every support person I reach, starts from scratch, can only see my order history and my return status, can’t seem to have access to any record of my previous dealings with previous support agents. After at least 5-6 contacts now, each time I have to explain the whole story from that start and each time I get a different answer. Once they say they are escalating. And other time I was told, that I just needed to wait 2 weeks and they would do a “manual refund” for me, whatever that is. Then I was told they were appealing it. Nothing actually happens. Just keep coming back to “wrong item, no refund”.

 

The listing was: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07XM9RM95

And the seller was: Mysello GmbH

 

Even if I somehow manage to beat the refund out of Amazon, I’m definitely not buying anything from them ever again. Certainly not in Europe. And I have been quite a regular Amazon shopper since 2012. Unlike their claim, I made very few returns, had very few complaints. But of course, them stealing 400 Euros from me, does ruin the trust.

 

 

That really sucks and I feel for you. BUT you got the drives and put them in a drawer WITHOUT even checking that they were correct until several months later? Checking would have taken seconds and helped to avoid all of this.

[klart]

1 hour ago, Blue4130 said:

That really sucks and I feel for you. BUT you got the drives and put them in a drawer WITHOUT even checking that they were correct until several months later? Checking would have taken seconds and helped to avoid all of this.

Maybe. However, they did agree to accept the return on my first contact. Their decision upon processing the return, that "you sent back something that's different from what you ordered, so no refund", that might very well have been the same if I had returned it right away. There's no real indication that time was a factor in this decision.

And on a level, it is understandable. How can I prove that these are the drives that they sent? Just as they couldn't really prove that they did send the correct item, as they obviously do not check that.

[linkboy]

35 minutes ago, klart said:

Maybe. However, they did agree to accept the return on my first contact. Their decision upon processing the return, that "you sent back something that's different from what you ordered, so no refund", that might very well have been the same if I had returned it right away. There's no real indication that time was a factor in this decision.

And on a level, it is understandable. How can I prove that these are the drives that they sent? Just as they couldn't really prove that they did send the correct item, as they obviously do not check that.

 

I went thru something similar last month. I bought a UAG Metropolis LT case that was open-box for my S25 Ultra. The case I received was the S23 Ultra version of the case. It was clear as day that someone bought the S25 Ultra version, returned their old S23 Ultra version and Amazon failed to check it properly and sold it as open-box. 

 

I called up customer service within minutes of me getting my package and they opened a return. 

 

Since I still wanted the case, I decided to re-buy it, but went with new. Waited the couple of days for the to arrive and when it did, I again didn't receive the case I actually bought. Instead, I got a case that I'm pretty sure Wish.com would sell on the clearance section of their website. Calling this thing cheap was an insult to cheap. It was paper thin and I'm pretty sure my phone would refuse to be put in it just on principal.. I again called customer service within minutes and was able to get that one returned and they said they opened a ticket to see what was going one.

 

I was told to wait a few days before ordering it again, but I ended up just getting the case from Best Buy and actually got the correct case on the first try.

 

After this, I'm not buying any phone cases from Amazon anymore.

[Blue4130]

37 minutes ago, klart said:

Maybe. However, they did agree to accept the return on my first contact. Their decision upon processing the return, that "you sent back something that's different from what you ordered, so no refund", that might very well have been the same if I had returned it right away. There's no real indication that time was a factor in this decision.

And on a level, it is understandable. How can I prove that these are the drives that they sent? Just as they couldn't really prove that they did send the correct item, as they obviously do not check that.

If you would have checked when you got them, and had the same problem, you would at least be able to do a charge back trhough your bank. (I assume that you are outside of the window on that, maybe worth checking)

 

This is also why I take video when I unbox big $ items. 

[Pusbucket]

On 9/2/2025 at 5:17 PM, klart said:

 

 

@klart

Actually the capacity is easily seen in this pic. The model numbers always indicate the size.

In the model # ST12000NM127  the portion I put in bold is the size; 12 terabyte. My 2 terabyte Seagate is ST2000*****.

The same naming convention holds for WD HDD's as well.

[Lurking]

On 9/2/2025 at 7:17 PM, klart said:

When the drives came, I’ve already hit the roof a bit, as they came in a large cardboard envelope, without any padding what so ever. This almost made me return them right away. But, as I am an IT professional and do know that HDDs are fairly shock resistant even in operation, much more so when off. So I’ve just put them aside. Probably because of this issue, I didn’t even look very close at the drives themselves. Also, as the picture shows, the seller was very intentional about the placement of the warehouse ID sticker.

 

Several months later, when I had everything together to upgrade my NAS, pulling these drives from the drawer, I notice that they are actually Seagate Enterprise Capacity 12TB drives. My disks are in a RAID-Z in my NAS, so of course drives that are smaller can not go into the array. As the return window was already long closed, I didn’t have much hope for any help from Amazon. But I still asked them, if they could do anything for me. To my surprise, on a support chat, laying out my problem, the support agent just said: “No problem, I’m creating a return label for you, you can send the drives back for a full refund”. I would have perfectly understood if they said: “The return window closed ages ago, we can’t help you”.

 

Suddenly it seemed like the whole problem could still be resolved and there would be no lasting issue. Instead, this is where things have really gone off the rails. After Amazon received the drives and processed them, I get an email saying “You sent the wrong thing back. You have been doing too many returns. We are disposing of the items you sent and refusing your refund.” That’s just a hair from accusing me of wanting to defraud them. And of course, them keeping those drives, is just straight up theft. If they refuse them, they should just return them to me. With all the trade wars, now even the 12TB drives are worth as much as the 16TB ones were last year.

Lesson learned, always test (or at least unpack) an item before the return window closes. In Amazon's defense, after so many weeks they could assume you are someone who has a dozen HDD laying around and just mixed them up.

 

I don't think the seller wanted to actively scam you and placed the sticker at that location to hide the 12TB. How would the seller have known you leave it unpacked for so long? This looks more like a mistake. For a scam they would have put a 16TB sticker on and would have sent a no-name 1TB HDD and would have amended the SMART data to show 16TB or something like that. 

 

Amazon dropped the ball where they refused to send you those HDD back. it is understandable they don't accept the return after such long time. But then they have to give you those HDD back. 

 

Maybe I missed it. Does the full model number (or serial number entered on Seagate website) indicate they are 12TB and not 16TB? Did you plug them in to see the actual capacity? 

[Blue4130]

33 minutes ago, Lurking said:

. 

 

Maybe I missed it. Does the full model number (or serial number entered on Seagate website) indicate they are 12TB and not 16TB? Did you plug them in to see the actual capacity? 

Yes, as shown by @jmwhite33hthe serial number that is clearly visible shows the size.

[Pusbucket]

42 minutes ago, Lurking said:

 

Maybe I missed it. Does the full model number (or serial number entered on Seagate website) indicate they are 12TB and not 16TB? Did you plug them in to see the actual capacity? 

Yes, and I just checked out of curiosity and all the SSD's I have also have the capacity in the model number.

I'm pretty sure it is that way for all HDD's and SSD's.

It's always in gigabytes, so the above is 12000 gigabytes or 12 terabytes.  If it were ST500*****, then it would be 500 gigs, etc.

[Lurking]

11 hours ago, jmwhite33 said:

Yes, and I just checked out of curiosity and all the SSD's I have also have the capacity in the model number.

I'm pretty sure it is that way for all HDD's and SSD's.

It's always in gigabytes, so the above is 12000 gigabytes or 12 terabytes.  If it were ST500*****, then it would be 500 gigs, etc.

So the capacity was visible all along despite the sticker covering the "12TB". I really doubt this was a scam attempt. Just a mistake that is very hard to rectify so many weeks (or months?) after delivery. 

 

Does Amazon have a hard rule by when to claim delivery damage or wrong item sent, or does it all fall under the generous "return it for any reason"  window of 30-90 days depending on product? 

 

I sometimes order commercial items and those can be many parts in a box (think like IKEA furniture, but more complex items). And you cannot literally see if everything is in the box or correct before you assemble. Sometimes those get assembled months later. and we also have internal transport of all those boxes. Something could get lost on our side. The warehouse we buy from (understandably)  get a bit upset when we claim shipping damage or something missing a few weeks after receiving. Sometimes the manufacturer provides a new part for free, sometimes we just have to admit we may have lost it and pay for it. It isn't a great situation for any of the parties involved. But happens. But for an HDD like in this case, it literally is on the buyer to check within a reasonable time. (and yes, Amazon should send them back to buyer)

 

And the Seagate HDD will fail anyway. What does it matter if you lose a 12TB or  16TG HDD? Wit the 12TB, you lose fewer data