SCARY fake Samsung AFC charger

[anon(10181084)]

So those of you who have seen my previous stuff regarding USB charge safety know that I take that stuff mega seriously and if I'm not sure a charger is 100% safe or legit, I have a look inside. Well, I took a charger that was sold to me along with a used phone back in August and took it apart. On the outside I could see the font was different than a legit Samsung charger, it said "Made in P.R.C" instead of Vietnam and the pins on the were USB port were not yellowish. Another weird thing is that it runs hotter when charging a 1.5 amp phone than even the old charger that came with my Tab S3 which runs quite hot when fast charging. I decided to take this piece of garbage apart, and believe me it wasn't easy. I had to slam the top of the charger with a 1kg exercise weight repeatedly until it broke off to reveal the insides. Immediately I noticed, before even reading the labels, that the blue interference filter capacitor is NOT a proper class Y1 safety capacitor (on the other hand the one in my charging station is a class Y1 capacitor according to the board label and the shape of said capacitor). I don't even have to bother to check the creepage distance between the primary and secondary, as this capacitor is bad enough. Should it fail, it will fail short and short the live AC line directly to the output of the switching power supply. This is particularly dangerous if you have a metal phone like the A6+ that this charger was sold with. Below are pictures of the horrific and cheap internals. I have no words and don't even wanna know how bad the transformer is (hopefully there is some tape between the windings...). This type of cheap JUNK is why people in Serbia occasionally have charger-induced house fires, why women using their phones in bathrooms (especially in Russia where there is usually no ground fault protection like RCDs or GFCI outlets on old home installations), why a kid in India was found dead after licking an iPhone charger plug, and so on... In comparison my inexpensive charging station has a triple insulated transformer, adequate creepage, proper safety capacitor and legit CE and double insulation certification. Chargers are not supposed to be a worry, but sadly that is not the case.

 

[B. Diddy]

Egad.

I also would've loved to see a video of you smashing this thing with a weight. Better than JerryRigEverything.

 

[Ry]

what retailer sold this to you?

 

[anon(10181084)]

what retailer sold this to you?

A Serbian phone repair shop that is otherwise great. They gave it for free with the €140 used phone I got. I am not sure even they even knew this was a fake. And what makes it worse is that in Serbia the outlets supply 220v which is much more dangerous...

 

[anon(10181084)]

Egad.

I also would've loved to see a video of you smashing this thing with a weight. Better than JerryRigEverything.

I used a 1kg exercise weight to bang the top of this fake charger until the lid came off...

 

[beandaddy]

wtf is afc?

 

[B. Diddy]

I suspect it's a typo -- meant to type AC.

 

[anon(10181084)]

Adaptive Fast Charging

 

[B. Diddy]

Oops! My mistake ...