Note: I do not in any way believe this. It's just a "what if" crackpot thought I had when I woke up this morning to a dead, unrecognizable SSD in my "beater" laptop and filled out the warranty claim.

Cheap SSDs that have generous 3-5 year warranties (3 years in my case) are designed to "fail" sometime within that period so that you'll send them in for RMA. They don't fail due to any component failure, just a pseudo-randomly timed soft brick that can only be reactivated by the manufacturer. When you RMA it, they reset the killswitch and harvest your data. The replacement you get is just one that someone else has RMA'd that they have un-bricked.