According to the New York Post, a woman’s Samsung Galaxy Note 9 started smoking and caught fire as she was riding an elevator. She has since filed suit.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A New York woman is suing Samsung after she claims the company’s Galaxy Note 9 smartphone started smoking and caught fire inside her purse.
No, not the disastrous, exploding Galaxy Note 7, which Samsung recalled in 2016. We’re talking about Samsung’s latest flagship phablet: the highly rated Galaxy Note 9, which just went on sale last month.
According to the New York Post, the incident occurred just after midnight on Monday, Sept. 3. The woman—a real estate agent named Diane Chung—was in an elevator in Bayside, Queens when the alarming episode occurred.
At first, her Galaxy Note 9 “became extremely hot,” court papers reportedly reveal. The woman then placed the device in her purse, but the problem didn’t go away.
Chung then became “extremely panicked” and started pressing buttons to try to get out. When the elevator reached the lobby and the doors opened, she kicked the phone out.
“The mobile didn’t stop burning until a good Samaritan grabbed it with a cloth and plunked it into a bucket of water,” the report notes.
Chung has filed charges in Queens Supreme Court seeking unspecified damages plus a restraining order to stop Samsung from selling the handset.
In an email to PCMag, Samsung said it’s looking into the incident.
“Samsung takes customer safety very seriously and we stand behind the quality of the millions of Galaxy devices in use in the United States,” Samsung wrote. “We have not received any reports of similar incidents involving a Galaxy Note 9 device and we are investigating the matter.”
In the case of the Note 7, it was not one, but two battery faults that caused devices to catch fire. Samsung has said the Note 9’s battery is safe.
“The battery in the Galaxy Note 9 is safer than ever,” Samsung CEO Koh Dong-jin said last month, according to The Investor . “Users do not have to worry about the batteries anymore.”
