Magnetic Toy Recalled After Two Children Hospitalized From Swallowing Loose Parts

The federal government has ordered a recall of tens of thousands of magnetic stick-figure toys sold on Amazon after two children swallowed the small, high-powered magnets inside them and had to be hospitalized, the latest entry in a recurring pattern of magnet-related recalls that regulators say keeps outpacing enforcement.

The recall notice posted by the Consumer Product Safety Commission on Thursday covers about 38,507 Jerify Magnetic Stick Figure Toy Sets, 30-piece kits of roughly 2.7-inch humanoid figures with magnets embedded in the hands and feet. The sets, made by the Chinese firm Hefei Hanchan Network Technology Co., doing business as Colerinsec, sold for about $21 on Amazon between October 2022 and May 2026. The CPSC said the toys violate the mandatory federal toy standard because the magnets inside can come loose and be small enough for a child to swallow.

What happened

According to the recall notice, the CPSC and the company are aware of two incidents in which children removed magnets from the toy's limbs and swallowed them; both children were hospitalized. If two or more high-powered magnets are ingested, the agency warns, they can attract each other or other metal objects through loops of intestine, clamping tissue between them and causing perforations, twisting, blockage, blood poisoning or death. Consumers who own the toy are told to take it away from children immediately, stop using it, and contact Colerinsec for a refund; the remedy process requires owners to discard the toy and submit a photo of it in the trash.

The Jerify recall was among the first to be reported outside the agency's own channels, but it was not an isolated action. It was one of 14 recalls the CPSC posted the same day, a batch that also included an 84,000-unit recall of a Melissa & Doug activity board sold at Target over a choking part that had come loose in 26 reports, and a 276,000-unit recall of an Esjay toddler busy board for violating the small-parts ban.

The numbers

The scale of the Jerify recall is modest next to some CPSC actions, but the underlying hazard is not. The agency has said that from 2010 through 2021, an estimated 26,600 magnet-ingestion cases were treated in U.S. hospital emergency rooms, with the annual count rising every year since 2018, and it had documented seven deaths tied to swallowed high-powered magnets by the time it finalized its current rule. Because ingested magnets often show no symptoms for days, injuries frequently are not caught until a child needs surgery.

The Jerify toy sets were sold continuously for roughly three and a half years — spanning the entire period the federal magnet standard has been in force — before the hazard was flagged. That standard, adopted in 2022, requires that any loose or separable magnet in a consumer product either be too big to swallow or weak enough, measured by a "flux index" below 50 kG²mm², to limit internal injury if swallowed.

How the rule came to exist

The CPSC's fight over small, powerful magnets predates this recall by more than a decade. An earlier magnet ban was struck down in court in 2016, and the commission spent years rebuilding its case with more injury data before its commissioners voted, in September 2022, to approve a mandatory federal safety standard for magnets. In that announcement, the agency argued that softer approaches had already failed.

"Less stringent measures, such as safety messaging, have historically been ineffective in attempting to persuade children, teens and caregivers to avoid the hazard," the commission said in approving the rule.

The rule itself then faced a legal challenge from hobby-industry and magnet-retailer groups, who argued the CPSC lacked sufficiently reliable data and that its commissioners, protected from at-will presidential removal, were unconstitutionally structured. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit rejected both arguments in March 2025, finding the agency's evidence adequate even though, as the court put it, CPSC — like many agencies — lacked "perfect empirical or statistical data." The ruling left the 2022 standard fully intact, which is the standard the Jerify toy sets are now said to have violated for the duration of their time on the market.

Who is affected

Anyone who bought a Jerify Magnetic Stick Figure Toy Set on Amazon since October 2022 is covered by the recall; the product was not sold in physical stores. Because the sets were marketed as fidget or building toys rather than explicitly as children's products, families may have kept them in households with young children without realizing they fell under the federal toy standard. Pediatric gastroenterologists and emergency physicians have separately noted that swallowed-magnet cases often involve toddlers and young school-age children who are drawn to the toys' small, colorful, tactile pieces, and that multiple magnets swallowed at different times — rather than all at once — pose the greatest risk of injury, since they can settle in different loops of intestine before attracting each other.

What happens next

The CPSC is directing owners to stop using the toy immediately and to report any suspected injury to SaferProducts.gov, the government's public incident-reporting database, rather than wait for a store return. The agency continues to post new recalls tied to the 2022 magnet standard on its public recall log at a steady clip, including several other magnet-toy actions in recent weeks, suggesting the standard's court victory has not yet closed the gap between the rule on paper and what is still reaching consumers through online marketplaces. The company's refund process requires consumers to destroy the toy and submit photographic proof before payment is issued; the CPSC has not said whether it is pursuing any additional enforcement action against Colerinsec beyond the recall itself.