Two Indian brothers were sentenced to 30 months in prison each by a US District Court in Seattle for selling counterfeit and adulterated medicines, including fake cancer drugs, in the United States.
The sentencing took place on Thursday, July 10, after Avanish Kumar Jha, 39, and Rajnish Kumar Jha, 36, were extradited from Singapore earlier this year. The two were arrested in Singapore on April 20, 2023, following a 2022 indictment, and extradited to the US in February 2025.
The case was heard by US District Judge Ricardo S. Martinez, who said, “The issue here is the introduction of adulterated drugs to people who think they are getting lifesaving drugs… This activity has so much risk to cause harm.”
The judge also imposed a fine of USD 50,000 on each brother and will decide in August whether to order restitution of USD 81,596 to pharmaceutical company Merck, which helped law enforcement test the fake drugs.
The Jha brothers operated a company called Dhrishti Pharma International and began selling fake medicines in 2019. They targeted customers in the US and other countries through internet advertisements. Undercover agents from the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations (FDA-OCI) and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (ICE-HSI) communicated with the brothers and ordered products.
The investigation revealed that one of the products the brothers sold was labeled as Keytruda, a cancer medicine developed by Merck. However, tests confirmed that the vial contained only over-the-counter heartburn medication and no trace of Keytruda’s active ingredient.
“The defendants made hundreds of thousands of dollars while defrauding people who were clinging to hope that a late-stage cancer medication could extend their life,” said Acting US Attorney Teal Luthy Miller. “When this investigation began, the first vial of medicine shipped to the undercover agent was not the cancer-fighting drug Keytruda at all but rather over-the-counter heartburn medicine in a bottle labeled as Keytruda.”
The brothers shipped the fake and adulterated medicines from India, using packaging methods meant to avoid detection by customs officials. Payments were made through wire transfers, direct money exchanges, and even cash collected by intermediaries in the US.
Assistant US Attorney Philip Kopczynski wrote, “Exporting counterfeit medicines is a cruel business that robs ill people of any hope for relief. Cancer patients unknowingly using fake Keytruda would have no chance of improvement with their terminal disease.” He added that schemes like these are not uncommon and violate important safety laws.
The investigation involved cooperation between several agencies, including the FDA, ICE-HSI, the US Department of Justice, and Singaporean authorities.
