Recently, Seagate’s security team in Singapore and Malaysia teamed up with officials from the Malaysian Ministry of Domestic Trade to bust a counterfeit hard drive operation just outside Kuala Lumpur.
The raid, which happened back in May, led to the seizure of nearly 700 Seagate internal hard drives—some with capacities up to 18TB—along with drives from Western Digital and Toshiba.
Reports from Heise, a German tech news site, suggest these drives likely originated in China, where they were previously used for Chia cryptocurrency mining. Once Chia mining became unprofitable, the drives were resold—which isn’t illegal on its own.
The problem? The scammers wiped the SMART data (used to analyse drive health) and then repackaged the drives as brand-new stock for retail. The scheme fell apart because Seagate drives store additional operational data that can’t be easily erased, tipping off investigators.
The counterfeit drives were being sold online through Shopee and Lazada. The workers didn’t just reset the SMART values—they also cleaned, relabelled, and repackaged the drives before shipping them out. In some cases, they even illegally upgraded the hardware, like turning a used desktop drive into a pricier surveillance-grade model.
The whole operation came to light when a Malaysian sales manager noticed the suspiciously low prices on these high-capacity drives and alerted Seagate’s security team. Now, Seagate is working with Malaysian authorities to track down the sources of these drives and identify everyone involved in the scam.