The operation offers some insight into how the scam operated, and confirms that no manufacturer was safe: WD and Toshiba drives were also found in the facility.
https://www.heise.de/news/Betrug-mit-Seagate-Festplatten-Festnahmen-in-Malaysia-10530697.html
(English version availble)
Interesting read. Glad this one workshop was closed down. Hopefully more will be located in the coming months and shut down as well.
I’d like to get my hands on the code to reset UDMA_CRC_ERRORS counter. I know all of mine were from a bad SATA cable. Why not reset that data.
I blame Chia farmers.
I called it out over 4 years ago.
I hate Chia Coin. 
It peaked at $1600 per coin. Now the cryptocurrency is worth $9 per coin. Good riddance. I hope the Chia farmers are pleased with themselves.
What a waste of time, money, and high capacity drives.
In all honesty, cryptocurrencies may be an issue by themselves, but the blame for this scam shall fall on the scammers, not on the Chia farmers.
If these drives were sold for what they are (used drives with x months of service) and at matching prices, these would be reasonable opportunies.
i personally got hit by this. managed to get refund though. But they didnt make it easy. Had to produces all the screenshots and proof to finally get the ecommerce platform to help refund me.
I used this docker container app to figure this out
drive bought was marketed as new, but farm showed a difference for smart power on hours and farm power on hours. and based on that found out the drive was used for 4 years. so smart was definitely resetted and resold as brand new.
that is how you tell.
I dont know whether the scammers had figured out how to bypass farm check yet or not, but the only saving grace is they at least acted and shutdown this one scam operation.
Funnily, one of the sellers i used before, i was told by a different buyer that seller was a scammer because they refused to honor the warranty. Also they found out from the seller the reason why, is because the supplier for that hdd bought from the store was recently shutdown. The timing for the shutdown of the scam operation and this online sellers supplier seems sus 
So now i have to look for a different source to buy hard drives.
does anyone know whether if you buy from OFFICIAL seagate store on amazon.com (us website), whether you can claim warranty in a different country without issue?
because last time i bought a HGST from italy, they said the warranty is specific to italy so i couldnt claim warranty though it was an original.
and if you are wondering, why not just buy from the local online official sellers. over here they dont sell at msrp. all the prices are jacked up COMPARED to amazon. go figure.
any ideas?
PS: checking farm only works on seagate hard drives like ironwolf and exos. I dont know what western digital do to check for smart resets.
I recommend if you buy a new hard drive, do a thorough test. I did the one suggested here
For my most recent purchase this what i did and it checked out. I even managed to check the serial number and that checked out also. But it’s store warranty, and another buyer said that the warranty wasn’t honored by that store, so… now i got to pray that i dont have to claim warranty for this drive. But it is indeed power on hours 0 even after checking farm to cross check with smart when i first got it. It’s a Seagate EXOS X18 12tb.
My previous EXOS were X12, and these were known to have high failure rates than normal (i didn’t know at the time). No such news about the X18 so those might be ok, though there are NEWER exos models X… but those cost more. but spec wise read/write and cache seems ok for my requirements.
Prior to exos, i was using Seagate ironwolf non pro. And before that i was using WD RED (not the ones affected by the SMR issue, but the read/write and cache specs were a bit too low spec compared to newer drives which was a con)
