Redditor buys Seagate hard drive to discover it's an empty shell with a microSD card inside

In another tech scam where a purchased component turns out to be just a shell of what it should be, the buyer of an external hard drive got a nasty surprise.

As per a Reddit post uncovered by Tom's Hardware that you can see above, the drive in question was a Seagate model, supposedly a 1TB Backup Plus Slim external HDD.

However, while "everything about it looked and felt legit" at first according to the Redditor, when the case of the external device was opened, there was a microSD card inside (presumably with a small capacity).

The heft of the unit was provided by a metal weight which was also glued into the fake drive's enclosure.

We aren't told where the Redditor in question actually bought the drive, but it's safe to assume it was a dubious third-party seller on one of the big retail platforms like Amazon or Aliexpress.

It's a lesson, if you needed one, in being careful about such merchants, and doing your research and due diligence when it comes to buying from a third-party seller via an online marketplace.

Fake graphics cards have become a particularly common scam in recent times, mainly because there's the opportunity to rip-off an unsuspecting buyer for a ton of money with one of NVIDIA's high-end models.

Witness the recent spate of fake GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards which turned out to be modded RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 boards, for example, which were completely non-functional.

As ever, if pricing looks too good to be true - outside of Black Friday and the like - then it most probably isn't true. And be very wary around those third-party sellers flaunting such hardware bargains.