After telling the seller I was just going to go to Ebay he's refunded me.
Apparently his supplier just refunded him after my pictures.
Obviously a lie, but his response confirms that they are indeed counterfeit.
Yep
A few years back I brought some WD drives of amazon, and I rushed the purchase and it came from a 3rd party.
The drives were functioning weird, and someone told me to check the serial's on WD's warranty checker, it came back as they not WD drives.
The give away was no NCQ support which was just weird, and they also were not 4k sectors.
Unfortunately for the seller his company is based in my city, I decided to turn up unannounced.
He was not there, he had 2 guys in an sort of open garage area building pc's, the conditions were really bad for a building environment, dirty and dusty, one of the guys got him on the mobile phone and we started talking. After about 5 minutes he realised I wasnt going to fall for it, so he said he would refund and the story provided for the warranty weirdness was that they were HP warranty instead.
I found the post I made on hardforum about it here.
https://hardforum.com/threads/wd-reds-changing-over-the-years-bait-and-switch.1917657/
I am pretty sure I lost data from it.
Data was copied to the drives, and wiped of source drives. I then noticed weird slow read performance (struggling to read data).
Data was then copied to new proper wd reds. But I suspect some data was lost as some videos and stuff I remember copying I can no longer find, and a few videos also got corrupted.