The Justice Department announced Tuesday that it has indicted two Indian nationals in federal court in Florida on charges of conspiracy to smuggle counterfeit Ozempic from China in an alleged conspiracy that continued even after the Food and Drug Administration seized some of the counterfeit weight-loss pills and warned the public in 2023.
One of them, 33-year-old Swapnadip Roy, was extradited from Italy and made his first appearance Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida.
Roy and his alleged co-conspirator, Vicki LaMancha, 37, are charged with one count of smuggling and conspiracy to defraud the United States, three counts of smuggling, and two counts of selling counterfeit drugs and keeping counterfeit drugs for sale. If convicted, both men face up to 71 years in prison.
La Mancha remains at large.
According to court documents, Roy and LaMancha are suspected of obtaining counterfeit Ozempic from unauthorized sources in China from July 2023 to April of next year. Popular medicines are made by Novorecently rebranded from the name Novo Nordisk.
The materials they and their co-conspirators allegedly distributed “included counterfeit packaging, package inserts, pen labels, and needles intended to deceive downstream customers into believing they were purchasing authentic, manufacturer-approved Ozempic,” the Justice Department said.
The newly unsealed indictment alleges that in July 2023, LaMancha entered into a sales agreement with an unidentified company in Lakeland, Florida, agreeing to supply the company with a product it said was Ozempic “at a significant discount.”
A month later, LaMancha entered into a contract with a Sanford, Fla., company to supply a product known as the “Ozempic syringe” at a deep discount, according to the indictment.
In November 2023, the indictment says, “Roy used intimidation to promote the distribution of his products in the United States,” and “Listen, I’m not your friend, okay? I’m not that guy.”
Roy went on to say, “I’m the guy who cuts off somebody’s (expletive) head and (expletive) cuts off the bodies of people’s dead wives with it,” the indictment alleges. “You (expletive) fix the problem. Get the truck there today.”
After Roy and LaMancha learned that the FDA had seized some of the product distributed in the United States, the co-conspirators asked LaMancha whether a related FDA warning would affect their order for an additional 60,000 units of Ozempic, the indictment says.
“Mr. LaMancha responded, ‘No, that’s not true, but I have to make sure my client isn’t doing anything stupid,'” the indictment states.
The incident comes as the use of so-called GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic, for weight loss purposes is becoming increasingly popular in the United States.
In July, Gallup reported that the percentage of U.S. adults taking GLP-1 drugs for weight loss rose from 3% in 2024 to 11% in 2026.
“And 15% reported using the drug for weight loss at some point, an increase of 9 percentage points compared to 2024,” Gallup noted.
“Counterfeit prescription drugs, especially the more common ones, threaten the health and safety of all Americans who depend on the integrity of our nation’s drug supply,” Assistant Attorney General A. Theisen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement Tuesday.
“These defendants allegedly exploited people’s health to pay their own way, and we will continue to pursue those who seek to defraud American consumers with counterfeit drugs,” Duva said.
