Maestro Technology Sells Used SSD Drives as New

Can you flash fake SMART data to drives? I suspect that's exactly what Maestro will start doing now (although it's possible it's not worth the effort for the small number of customers who will actually check this stuff).

Yes, most of the used Amazon SATA Rotated Drive its do this with "fresh" data.

Is there any way to tell if the SMART has been reset/tampered with in any way? If you have a drive that claims to have 0 hours of use, but it quickly starts to rack up failure indicators… how can you tell if it’s spurious failures or a fraudulent tampered drive?

Seagate has a proprietary version of SMART called FARM. It’s supposed to be more tamper resistant than SMART, but it appears the fraudsters have figured out how to manipulate it too [1].

The best you can do is check FARM if available and perform a long burn-in with something like badblocks. Then compare the SMART data before and after the burn in. Checking the serial number against the manufacturers database if available is also a good precaution.

These are probably things you should be doing whether or not the drive is allegedly new.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Larger-disks-wi...