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Hard disc counterfeiting workshop unearthed

18.8.2025

Translation: machine translated

Used HDD instead of new: This scenario was a reality for some people who bought a supposedly new hard drive at the beginning of the year. Now the manufacturer concerned, Seagate, can claim success against the counterfeiters.

The investigations by hard drive manufacturer Seagate are beginning to bear fruit: together with officials from the Malaysian Ministry of Domestic Trade, the manufacturer has uncovered a counterfeiting workshop near Kuala Lumpur. According to the company, this is said to have taken in several thousand US dollars a month, as Heise reports.

At the beginning of the year, the magazine revealed that hundreds of hard drive buyers were victims of counterfeiting. Instead of a new hard drive, they received used drives. Most of the cases came from German-speaking countries. Customers of Digitec Galaxus were also affected.

Almost 700 Seagate internal hard drives of different variants and capacities were seized during the raid. Drives from Toshiba and Western Digital also turned up. The counterfeiting workshop not only handled counterfeiting, but also sales, logistics and order fulfilment.

Striving against counterfeiting

Seagate and the investigating authorities discovered the counterfeiters through a Malaysian sales manager. He found drives at unusually low prices on the e-commerce platforms Shopee and Lazada. He alerted the manufacturer, who checked the drives and discovered the counterfeit.

Seagate is strengthening its partner programme in response to the counterfeits. Official Seagate partners will be contractually obliged to purchase and resell hard drives exclusively from authorised distributors.

It is doubtful that there will be no more counterfeits in the future - even if there have been fewer cases of counterfeit HDDs in recent months. The business still seems too attractive. Especially as cases of Toshiba and Western Digital hard drives have now also been confirmed. Their counterfeiting is even more difficult to prove than that of Seagate, according to Heise

Header image: Shutterstock / Silver Wings

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Kevin Hofer

Senior Editor

kevin.hofer@digitecgalaxus.ch

From big data to big brother, Cyborgs to Sci-Fi. All aspects of technology and society fascinate me.

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