I'm not an electrical engineer, but wiring something other than ground to the ground pin is...well, I suspect it's straight-up malicious, although why you'd want to do something like this, I don't know.
> I suspect it's straight-up malicious Hanlon's razor: "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice." It doesn't even make rational sense for a business creating cables to intentionally damage equipment. They'd just get sued, tons of bad PR/reviews, and gain nothing obvious. More likely they just had production line issues, lack of QA, and poor training for staff. Resulted in malfunctioning equipment being sold.…
My point is that it may be more complicated to assume stupidity, because the process of getting someone that incredibly dumb into a position where he's dictating the wiring pattern of the cable, with nobody telling him he's an idiot in the process, is far more complex than most forms of stupidity. Hanlon and Occam may be at odds here.