Two Men Charged for Illegally Importing Counterfeit Medications

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the arrest of two people for illegally importing counterfeit weight loss products including GlaxoSmithKline’s alli.

According to the DOJ, the two Chinese born men, imported weight loss products they claimed were cheaper versions of FDA approved medications.

Sengyang Zhou, a Chinese national was arrested in Hawaii last week. Zhou, during the course of the investigation implicated himself as the maker of the counterfeit Alli.

Qin Ming Hu, a U.S. citizen, born in China was arrested in Plano; Texas last week. According to the DOJ the charges could result in nearly 20 years of prison time and hundreds of thousands in fines for Zhou and several years in prison and fines of nearly $250,000 for Hu.

"The Food and Drug Administration will work together with other government entities to aggressively target those individuals who put the public's health at risk by selling counterfeit drugs," FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said recently in a published statement.

The two men were apparently successful in marketing their bogus products over the Internet to consumers seeking less expensive medications online. The counterfeit medications, identical to the packaging of the branded medications, reportedly contained dangerous levels of the active ingredient used in the authentic drugs.

XStream Systems encourages all members of the pharmaceutical supply chain to use an authentication process to verify their inventories and protect healthcare consumers from dangerous adulterated, fraudulent, sub potent and counterfeit medications.

To learn more about an anti-counterfeiting technology which is being used to discover fraudulent, adulterated and counterfeit drugs in the pharmaceutical supply chain, visit: http://www.xstreamsystems.net/.