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Comment by gwerbin | Hacker News Reader

Upwards of half the ads I see on YouTube are obvious scams. There's no way nobody at Alphabet is aware.

Search for 4TB or 8TB USB sticks on amazon.com. You’ll find dozens or hundreds of $20-30 16GB or 32GB sticks with hacked firmware to report a multi-terabyte drive size, and dozens of one star reviews talking about how it lost their data. Those sizes, if real, would be $400+.

Of course they know. They have no civil or criminal consequences for engaging in a conspiracy to commit large scale wire fraud, so of course they just let it happen, because who wants to speak up and cause the metrics to go down?

In some countries where the consumer law is protective enough you can basically get those USB sticks for free. You buy them and then use a linux tool[0] to prove that they are fake. It also allows you to fix the flash drive to report its size correctly. Using the evidence you claim a refund. In my experience the seller doesn’t usually bother with a return which will be at their cost. So then you’re left with the USB and your money.

This also incidentally has the effect of making their business less profitable, so arguably it’s your moral duty if you can do this at no cost to yourself.

It really depends on the platform and your country’s consumer laws. Some platforms force a return which makes this whole exercise not worth it.

[0] https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3

Forcing a return does generally cost them even more though (costs of restocking, inspecting it, etc), so those platforms tend to penalize return-heavy vendors more.

So it still works, in some ways :)

I thought my country is protective, but last time I've tried that I was supposed to return the scammy pendrive to some random address in China, at my expense. And the process was, only when seller confirms they received the package I get my refund. Needles to say, I didn't bother (though if I argued enough, I could probably get those few euro back).

Lots of them were using Jordan Peterson's voice for a while

I wonder why - Peterson's voice is not an exactly pleasant one...

Sounds like a perfect choice to me, he had a cult leader-esque appeal with a subset of the same audience that would easily fall for scams.

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