Bitcoin Forum

Hi all is it safe to buy a Ledger Nano or any hardware wallet from Amazon or eBay ?  can they be tampered with or cloned in anyway?  how can i be sure it has not been compromised?

I would personally only buy hardware wallets from certified resellers or from the producer him/her self. There are some ways to provide a certain degree of protection, for example some wallets contain a seal, some wallets are completely made out of one piece of plastic (unopenable).
You could also install fresh, signed, firmware from the original creator of the wallet (at least in some cases).

I personally believe chances of buying tampered hardware wallets are very, very slim... But i don't like to take chances.

I agree the chances are slim but scammers go to great lengths these days and if i am putting all my bitcoin on it i dont want to take the risk, thanks for the reply  ;)

Chances of receiving a flashed or modified wallets are higher through ebay or Amazon. As others said scammers these days go to great lengths. I personally bought my Ledger HW.1 from the official website, www.ledgerwallet.com and when it arrived it was sealed.

It's been 2 and a bit more months and I am loving it, it's working perfectly. I highly recommend to buy for the official website from piece of mind.

I haven't heard any reports of people receiving tampered devices from sources like amazon.

I don't personally know how the ledger nano is packaged, but the packaging from a trezor is glued so sturdy that it is next to impossible to open it without leaving marks. Also, the trezor will show an error if any unofficial firmware is loaded on it. Not sure if the ledger nano does this as well?

If it saves you only a couple of dollar, might as well just get t from the official source. Especially if you plan to load serious amounts on it. Better safe than sorry in the end.

Chances that things could go wrong could be low but to avoid any risks , It would be better to buy it from the official website instead, Ledger Nano is one of the cheapest wallets out there so I don't see a reason on why you want to use a third party website In this case.

Yeah as others have said, if you're buying the Ledger Nano S, you're probably quite concerned over the safety of your coins so I'd say it'd be best to buy them from Ledgerwallet themselves.

I don't think it would be that easy to tamper with due to the way the ledger works.

Check out this article:
https://blog.ledger.co/how-to-protect-hardware-wallets-against-tampering-cad35cb72c1#.gt6cstzgl

One quote from the article says "There is absolutely no way that an attacker could replace the firmware and make it pass attestation, without knowing the Ledger private key."

Looks like you should be pretty safe regardless if it passes that attestation test.

Here is another article about verifying the integrity:
https://ledger.groovehq.com/knowledge_base/topics/how-to-verify-the-security-integrity-of-my-nano-s

While it is probably best to buy it directly from the manufacture, you will probably be safe as long as you verify its integrity with attestation.

Lots of great info in here - thanks all.
I think I'll be getting a Ledger myself. :)

Thanks to all for the replies,  yeah normally i would buy direct, but this was actually part of my wishlist on Amazon for christmas gifts,  and if i had of told the person that was buying it to go to ledger website and i want this, they would have had a mind fart and probably would have got me socks instead. lol  :D

I actually contacted ledger support and asked if it was safe to buy their products from amazon and they actually informed me that it was actually their personal listing on Amazon, so it was fine.

Thanks again

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ledger-HW-1-Multisig-Hardware-wallet/dp/B01D05WDL0/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1482933278&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=ledgerwallet

About 5 months ago Customer had ordered an AMD Ryzen 7 CPU but instead they recieved an Intel Celeron.
Seller were swapping out those CPU, resealing, sending to retailer. This, of course, got revealed. But swapping HW Wallets with modified ones wouln't be detected that fast.

IMO the best way is to buy them directly from the manufacturer.

no it is not good to buy it is from that. so you have to buy from any official site. it is very useful to you. few items are not good in amazon. so it is more important wallet so don't try to buy in this. if you buy means it get more repairs and troubles so don't encourage few things from shopping web sites.

If you go to

https://www.ledgerwallet.com/retailers

You can see the official resellers of Ledger Nano S .

Being from the UK myself, the official re seller "SmoothBuying" accepted by Ledger, sells via Amazon.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?marketplaceID=A1F83G8C2ARO7P&me=A20KY4K6F96L6Q&merchant=A20KY4K6F96L6Q&redirect=true

However the price is pretty steep!!