Seagate responds to fraudulent hard drives scandal, says resellers should only buy from certified partners
Resellers appear to get the blame.
Resellers appear to get the blame.
I mean yeah, that makes sense. If you’re buying from a random reseller, there’s always a chance that they’re selling fraudulent things
Is Amazon considered a “certified partner”?
Depends. Are you buying from Amazon directly, or one of the resellers on Amazon Marketplace? This is the problem with having storefronts that allow third party sellers and minimal differentiation between the two.
And to complicate it further, Amazon has a history of merging all similar products together when sellers send the items to the distribution center to qualify for things like Prime shipping. So even if one seller sends in legitimate products, a counterfeit product seller will get their product into the same bin. Then a consumer buys the item, a random one from the bin is sent out, could be legitimate, could be counterfeit. And, at least in the past (not sure if they ever changed) and complaints will go against whichever seller Amazon credited the sale to, because they don't even track where individual products in the bin came from.
This was a huge issue a few years back with Otterbox products since there are a lot of certified resellers, and a lot of counterfeits.
Maybe just the Amazon Seagate store?
Some of the affected resellers are on Seagates official reseller list. If they actually bought drives from god-knows-where Seagate has some cleaning up to do.