A man was caught in Houston, Texas, on charges that he sold and sent fake cancer drugs worth tens of thousands of dollars to people in the United States.
An Indian man named Sanjay Kumar, 43 was charged by a federal grand jury on Thursday.
According to the U.S. Justice Department, he was caught in Houston on Friday while he was in the country to work out more deals to grow his illegal business of selling fake cancer drugs in the U.S.
Kumar and his partners are accused of planning the sale and shipping of fake Keytruda and other cancer drugs to people in the U.S. who didn’t know what was going on.
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It was said by the DOJ that real Keytruda is an immunotherapy for cancer that is allowed in the U.S. for 19 different uses. These include treating lung cancer, head and neck cancer, stomach cancer, cervical cancer, breast cancer, Hodgkin lymphoma, and melanoma.
The DOJ says that Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC is the only company in the U.S. that can make and sell Keytruda.
One count of plot to traffic fake drugs and four counts of trafficking fake drugs are being brought against Kumar. If found guilty, he could spend up to 20 years in jail for each count.