How old HDDs end up on e-shops: counterfeit hard drive workshop busted in Malaysia

Malaysian authorities have raided a workshop converting used hard drives into counterfeit new ones, which are later resold on major marketplaces.

According to the German publication Heise, Seagate’s security teams, in conjunction with Malaysian authorities, raided a major HDD counterfeiting workshop outside of Kuala Lumpur.

During the bust, investigators seized nearly 700 Seagate internal hard drives of various models and capacities of up to 18TB, along with additional drives made by Western Digital and Toshiba.

Cybernews has previously reported on scammers selling used drives as new, abusing the platforms of many legitimate retailers, including Amazon. Counterfeit drives have their SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data erased.

Recently, old drives of up to 10 years have been found reused in popular UnionSine external hard drives sold as new on Amazon.

🚨 Seagate Uncovers End-to-End Hard Drive Fraud Ring in Malaysiahttps://t.co/ygkqciII20 pic.twitter.com/EXng5BnTRV

undefined Dark Web Informer (@DarkWebInformer) August 18, 2025

Six men were found working in the workshop. They provided more information about their work: not only did they reset SMART values, but they also cleaned, relabeled, and repackaged the drives before shipping them to local e-commerce platforms.

According to Heise, counterfeit drives were sold through Shopee and Lazada, the two largest e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia.

The scammers also tried to profit by upgrading the drives into more expensive products for surveillance systems.

According to Seagate’s representatives, similar fraud now occurs on all major marketplaces, and the company plans to strengthen its partner program to ensure that users get genuine hard drives.

Most of the old drives originate from China, where they were used to store the cryptocurrency Chia, based on a unique consensus mechanism called proof-of-space-and-time.

When mining cryptocurrency with HDDs became unprofitable, the old hardware was resold. Heise.de estimates that around one million drives were removed from the Chia network.