Examining two pieces of dangerous fake cube shaped USB phone chargers. Let’s test them and see what’s inside, plus a high voltage insulation test. Some chargers may not comply with safety regulations and they may cause an electric shock or fire. Their current rating may be fake, the output voltage may be wrong and they can damage your devices.

Viewer comments:

The worse phone charger I ever had contained one rectifier diode, one resistor, a capacitor, a 5v zener and an LED. Needless to say there was no isolation and no fuse and the sleeve of the USB was live!

Literally the bare minimum
More dangerous than electric chair

I’ve always wanted to see HV tests, but never thought to use a microwave transformer.

But the destruction from it is definitely welcome.

Also, the voltage drifting outside of spec on the first one would probably be beneficial with the garbage USB cables that come with these things, it’d help compensate for the loss on the cable lol

The reason that cube shaped chargers seems to be popular is that, these are a clone of Apple’s US 5W charger.

Of course the genuine 5w Apple cubes are much safer.

Well, atleast from what I saw in several teardowns, it seems to be much better engineered with lots of safety in mind.

I also had a few of those cubes since the day of iPhone 6, and it still works to this day.

It’s safe and outputs one of the lowest ripple DC. It’s not necessarily the best of the best but it’s up there in terms of quality. It still has that tell-tale voltage drop as you near the maximum rated current much like most other chargers. There are a lot of tests on the internet comparing popular chargers and the 5v Apple cube is a common mainstay in the comparisons. It’s been proven.

That new stress test is great. It would be great to see temperature of components with an infrared cameras during that time (I don’t know if you have one)

Examining two pieces of dangerous fake cube shaped USB phone chargers. Let’s test them and see what’s inside, plus a high voltage insulation test. Some chargers may not comply with safety regulations and they may cause an electric shock or fire. Their current rating may be fake, the output voltage may be wrong and they can damage your devices.

Another collection of dodgy USB phone chargers from eBay. This time a quick charger edition. Three cheap USB chargers that support 18W QC3.0 charging and they can supply 5V 3A, 9V 2A or 12V 1.5A. Some of those cheap chargers may not comply with safety regulations and they may cause an electric shock or fire. They also tend to have a non-existent interference suppression, poor output voltage regulation and a fake current rating.

Dangerous USB phone chargers 7 (QC 3.0)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FIo7eMI0hU

Yet another collection of 2 dodgy quick QC3.0 USB phone chargers from eBay, probably fake Qualcomm. Some questionable chargers may not comply with safety regulations and they may cause an electric shock or fire. Their current rating may be fake and they can damage your devices.

Thoughts on the death of Ma Ailun
According to reports, a woman in China was tragically electrocuted using her iPhone while it was charging. This seems technically plausible to me if she were using a cheap or counterfeit charger like I describe below. There’s 340 volts DC inside the charger, which is enough to kill. In a cheap charger, there can be less than a millimeter separating this voltage from the output, a fraction of the recommended safe distance.

Another dangerous USB charger. This one is even worse than the previous one. Not only it is dangerous (can cause electric shock or fire), it is also completely useless. It can’t supply the 1A current at 5V. At 0.5A the voltage already drops to 2.7V. The separation of primary and secondary side is only 0.5mm on the PCB. The transformer also looks dodgy and the tiny EMI capacitor (connecting primary to secondary) is only rated 1kV. It has no fuse, fusible resistor or inrush resistor. The boards have no apparent separation line, it is just one jungle of tracks, primary and secondary side riddled like a maze.

Today I made a teardown of a travel power extension socket with a USB charger from China with a picture of a mouse on it. It has a mains plug, a cable, mains socket and 4 USB sockets. It immediately looks quite dangerous because of a very thin mains cable and a 3-terminal mains socket, despite the mains plug is just 2-pin non-grounded. The ground (earth) terminal doesn’t go anywhere. The charger can’t continuously supply the claimed 4.8A current and the mains isolation is questionable. Risk of electric shock and fire.

Teardown Tuesday.
What is inside a fake clone A1265 Apple USB charger?
WARNING: These fakes and cheap no-name chargers are DANGEROUS. If you have one, throw it out and get a quality one.

Look at “CAUTION” area, it says “For use with infor technology equipment.”

For comparison:
Apple iPhone charger teardown: quality in a tiny expensive package
http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-quality.html

The flat one has one of the scariest transformers yet with no extra insulation between the secondary and sense windings. It also had a rather odd output capability of around just 20mA before the voltage plummeted.

Another dangerous USB charger. This one is even worse than the previous one. Not only it is dangerous (can cause electric shock or fire), it is also completely useless. It can’t supply the 1A current at 5V. At 0.5A the voltage already drops to 2.7V. The separation of primary and secondary side is only 0.5mm on the PCB. The transformer also looks dodgy and the tiny EMI capacitor (connecting primary to secondary) is only rated 1kV.

There are two boards connected with a cable containing both primary and secondary side. Components on one board are touching components on the other board. This is definitely an electrocution device.