Man Electrocuted While on Cell Phone

A man in India was electrocuted while listening to music on his charging cell phone, the Hindustan Times reports. Police in the central state of Madhya Pradesh identified the victim as Sunil Yuvne. They said the 27-year-old suffered shocks on Saturday morning likely from an earphone attached to his mobile phone, which was plugged into an electrical outlet. His family in Jajalpur village rushed him to a clinic, where he was pronounced dead. There was no information about the kind of phone and charger he was using; the head constable tells the Times of India "the [charger] wire was having some fault that led to the incident." While the chances of being electrocuted on a charging cell phone are highly remote, it has happened before.

In April, a Malaysian woman died on her birthday after being shocked while speaking on her charging smartphone, per Digital Trends, which also cites a July 2013 case in which a Chinese woman reportedly died in a similar manner. That woman's family said she left the bath to answer her plugged-in phone. In the wake of the 2013 report, a spokesman for the US Consumer Product Safety Commission told CNN that overheating is a more common danger for phone users. "We have seen very few incidents related to shock or electrocution," Scott Wolfson said, though he did caution against using cheap third-party chargers, which CNN noted can feature substandard insulation. (This is why you shouldn't sleep with your phone.)