Amazon Prime Day warning: Be careful about fake USB drives and suspicious microSD cards

Amazon has been warned many times about the presence on their sites of potentially storage products (by myself and my peers) including fake external microSD and fake USB flash drives. While the online retailer can be applauded for doing as much as it can to stem the flood of fake devices, there’s still a lot to be done.

Prime Day starts in a few hours and when I searched for the generic term flash drive on Amazon.com, a bunch of too-good-to-be-true 1TB USB flash drives with a low number of positive customer ratings appeared on the first page of results.

Now, I am not saying that ALL of them are fakes - that could land me in trouble. But think about it, you wouldn't buy milk that only had the word milk printed on the carton, would you? The lack of clear branding is a telltale sign of something fishy as is poor image editing. See examples below.

The cheapest genuine 1TB I could find costs around $80 (Sandisk 1TB); the too-good-to-be-true ones retail for less than $30 and that is a problem as cash-strapped customers may be fooled into buying these false “bargains” since quite a few of them made their way into Amazon’s hot new releases list, one that gets a good amount of exposure on Amazon’s own website. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Amazon shoppers may have been stung with the fake products.

Outside of USB Flash drives, microSD cards are also favorite targets for storage scammers. So yes, that 1TB microSD card that sells for an incredible $19.99 is likely to be a disappointment. To Amazon’s credit though (and a proof that this problem can be eradicated), fake large capacity external SSD (like the ones I flagged in my article) have been eliminated completely.

Remember that a fake USB flash drive or other storage device can not only cost you short change you but also damage your computer or even worse, compromise your security by loading malware onto your computer without you knowing.