According to the ACCC, between March 2016 and October 2018, Samsung Australia authorized several marketing campaigns through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as the company’s own website, in which several smartphone models were claimed to be suitable for use in swimming pools and seawater. Among the phones sold with these claims were the Samsung Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, the Galaxy A5 (2017), Galaxy A7 (2017), the Samsung Galaxy S8, S8 Plus, and the Galaxy Note 8. In total, the ACCC estimates the company sold more than 3.1 million of these devices in Australia over a three-year period.
What Samsung’s advertising campaign failed to tell users was that the charging ports of these smartphones could corrode if users attempted to charge them before they were dry. Meanwhile, ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said that Samsung did not warn consumers about these possible problems in the nine advertisements the company commissioned to promote the products. Several of Samsung’s marketing materials from the time had images of people using these smartphones in water in a bid to further drive the notion that these devices were truly water-resistant.