Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment Tuesday charging two Indian nationals with running counterfeit Ozempic into the United States from unauthorized suppliers in China, in a scheme that court filings say began in July 2023 and continued into April 2024, months after the Food and Drug Administration seized counterfeit versions of the drug and warned the public it had entered the supply chain.
The defendants are Swapnadip Roy, 33, who also used the name Eric Roy, and Vicky Ramancha, 37. Both are Indian citizens living in Dubai, according to CBS News. The indictment was returned in the Middle District of Florida, in Tampa, and unsealed Tuesday, the same day Roy made his first appearance in federal court after being extradited from Italy.
What the indictment says the two men did
The charges are one count of conspiracy to commit smuggling and to defraud the United States, three counts of smuggling, and two counts of selling counterfeit drugs and holding them for sale. Each count carries exposure that adds up to a maximum of 71 years in prison, though federal sentences are governed by guidelines that rarely reach the statutory ceiling, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless convicted.
The counts map the scheme's stages. The smuggling charges cover moving goods into the country contrary to law. The counterfeit counts cover what the goods were: drugs made to look like a branded product and held out for sale without the maker's authorization. The conspiracy count ties the stages together and lets prosecutors introduce the messages and threats described in the filings as evidence of one agreed plan rather than isolated acts. Conviction on all six counts would require the government to prove each stage separately, which is part of why most federal drug cases end in plea agreements rather than trials.
The scheme as prosecutors describe it did not depend on manufacturing the drug. It depended on packaging and price. According to the filings, the two men obtained counterfeit Ozempic from unauthorized Chinese sources, complete with counterfeit packaging, package inserts, pen labels and needles designed to convince pharmacies and patients that the product was genuine, manufacturer-authorized Ozempic. The drug is made by Novo Nordisk of Denmark, and the real version moves through an FDA-supervised wholesale chain that the filings say the defendants bypassed. The counterfeit doses were allegedly sold to co-conspirators and U.S. distributors at steeply discounted prices, and those distributors moved them onward to consumers.
Prosecutors also say the two men treated compliance concerns as an obstacle to be waved aside. In one message quoted in the filings, they told a company that if it wanted the product cheap, it had to understand that some corners were being cut. The filings further allege that the pair threatened people in their distribution network.
The path a counterfeit takes into a pharmacy
Prescription drugs reach American pharmacies through a closed chain. Distributors must be authorized by the manufacturer or the FDA, and a 2013 law, the Drug Supply Chain Security Act, requires the chain to keep electronic records tracing each package from the maker to the dispenser, a system whose deadlines have been phasing in for years. The point of the system is the record. If a bad product surfaces, investigators can walk the chain backward to the point where it entered.
The scheme described in Tampa did not defeat that system. It bypassed it. The filings say the counterfeit product was sold at deeply discounted prices to co-conspirators and distributors, the kind of discount that exists because the sellers never bought from Novo Nordisk and never registered with anyone. A pharmacy that buys from an unauthorized source saves money at the moment of purchase and drops out of the tracing chain at the same time. That is why the FDA's alerts to providers focus less on spotting a fake pen than on verifying the supplier. The packaging can be excellent. The paperwork is where a counterfeit usually gives itself away, if anyone asks for it.
The tracing system depends on everyone in the chain doing the recording, and a seller who never joins the chain is invisible inside it until a case like this one assembles the picture from the other end, working from seized product back to the people who moved it.
The shipment that arrived after the warning
The government's own public warnings are part of the case's timeline. In December 2023, the FDA notified consumers, pharmacies and providers that counterfeit Ozempic had been found in the U.S. supply chain, and the agency seized counterfeit product that month. The alerts asked the people handling the drug to inspect what they had on hand and to report anything suspicious, and the agency kept issuing them as investigators found more counterfeit product in the months that followed. The indictment alleges the operation kept going anyway.
The sequence gives the government a second kind of case to make. Separate from the smuggling counts, prosecutors can argue that the defendants were on notice, from the government's own public documents, that the exact product they were moving was counterfeit product the agency had already identified and seized.
The most concrete example is a shipment in March 2024, when Ramancha allegedly arranged for about 11,000 units of the counterfeit drug to be delivered to a warehouse in Ohio. Thousands of doses also went to companies in Florida, according to the filings. That March 2024 shipment landed roughly three months after the FDA's seizure and alert, which makes the warning not just context for the case but evidence inside it: prosecutors can point to a public notice that put the defendants on notice of exactly what they were selling.
How counterfeit packaging survives the last check
Pharmacy-level verification of a GLP-1 pen rests on a visual and tactile inspection that counterfeiters have learned to satisfy: the carton, the insert, the label on the pen and the needles. When all four look right, the counterfeit passes the same glance that a genuine product passes. The difference surfaces later, if the drug does not work as expected, or in a laboratory, which is where the FDA's testing and the criminal investigation met.
That is the pattern in counterfeit pharmaceutical cases generally, and it is why the December 2023 warnings asked pharmacists to look beyond the packaging, at lot numbers and supply chains. The Ozempic case adds a wrinkle that drug counterfeiting shares with luxury goods: the demand is driven by price and supply. When the authentic product is expensive or difficult to fill, the discount is the tell that the patient or the distributor most needs to notice, and the least likely one to prompt a question.
The extradition and the defendant still at large
Roy was arrested in Italy on an INTERPOL Red Notice and extradited with the help of the Justice Department's Office of International Affairs, a detail that reflects how the case was built: the alleged suppliers were in China, the defendants in Dubai, the distributors in Florida and Ohio, and the arrest in Europe. Ramancha remains at large.
The extradition took place roughly a year and a half after the conduct described in the indictment ended, and the indictment itself was unsealed months after it was returned. The lag is typical of multi-jurisdiction smuggling cases, where the government needs custody of a defendant, or at least a sealed charging document, before making the allegations public. But it also means that whatever deterrent value a prosecution carries arrives long after the scheme stopped, and in this case while one charged defendant is still a fugitive.
Why these cases move slowly
The geography explains the pace. The alleged suppliers were in China, the defendants in Dubai, the buyers in Florida and Ohio, and the arrest in Italy, which means every step the government took it took through another country's legal system. Extradition rests on a treaty, requires the host country's courts to approve the transfer, and takes months even when the subject does not fight it. Evidence travels the same way, through mutual legal assistance requests that can take longer than the extradition itself. Sealing the indictment kept the charges quiet while the government waited for custody, which protected the investigation but also meant the scheme described in the charges had ended well before the public learned it existed. Ramancha, charged and at large, is now the live test of that machinery: the government will need another country to arrest him and another court to approve sending him here.
What the case can and cannot reach
Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas said in the announcement that infiltrating the American drug supply with counterfeit products is not just a crime, and the case's value to the agency is partly in what it demonstrates about tracing products across borders into domestic distribution. The FDA's Office of Criminal Investigations led the investigation alongside the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa and the Justice Department's Criminal Division.
What the prosecution cannot reach is the market condition that made the scheme profitable. Counterfeit GLP-1s have been found repeatedly since the FDA's first warnings, in the United States and elsewhere, because a drug with overwhelming demand, a high list price and periodic supply limits creates a standing invitation for someone to sell a convincing fake at a discount. The indictment describes a link between Chinese suppliers and American distributors. The discount, and the demand that made the discount work, remain.
The agency's message is that it will keep tracing the networks wherever they lead, and the charges are meant to show that the tracing reaches across borders and into a courtroom. What no tracing reaches is the price gap that built the market. While the authentic drug costs multiples of a convincing counterfeit, and while supply runs tight enough that patients and pharmacies go looking, the conditions that carried this product from Chinese suppliers to an Ohio warehouse remain in place for the next seller.
Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said the department will keep pursuing anyone who deceives American consumers with counterfeit drugs, which is the right promise to make and also the one the FDA made in December 2023, three months before the Ohio shipment left. The case shows the enforcement system working through a sealed indictment, an extradition request and a Red Notice, and every tool in that system engages after the product has already moved. The counterfeit product moved faster.
Primary sources
- CBS News for the indictment's charges, the defendants' backgrounds, the shipment quantities and the message quoted in the filings.
- FDA for the announcement of the charges, the agency's December 2023 counterfeit Ozempic alerts and the seizure, and Acting Commissioner Kyle Diamantas's statement.
- Justice Department for the case page in United States v. Swapnadip Roy and Vicky Ramancha and the role of the Office of International Affairs in the extradition.