A Huntington Beach man has been sentenced to over 24 years or 288+ months in prison. The accused had allegedly attempted to avoid the prosecution for fentanyl drug trafficking and as well as money laundering schemes. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office had stated that the accused had been identified as Damon Vincent Jobin of age 32 years. He had earlier pleaded guilty to the federal charges this year for conducting a conspiracy to commit money laundering and to distribute a Fentanyl analogue owing to a fentanyl drug trafficking scheme via darknet.

The federal prosecutors have stated that the accused along with the other conspirators, had sold pills that they had manufactured containing fentanyl drug or its analogue or derivative all across the country via the darknet market. After this, he laundered the proceeds via various online cryptocurrency exchanges.

A federal grand jury had indicted the accused Jobin, arrested him in Los Angeles back in November 2018 and had ordered to appear at a federal court in the South Dakota. Instead, he fled to Thailand, and after that, a federal arrest warrant was issued. The Royal Thai Police took the accused into custody back in June 2019, and he was transported from Thailand to South Dakota by the U.S. Marshals.

The investigation had included the law enforcement carried seizure of 20,000 pills that was sent via the mail, as stated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The prosecutors had alleged that the accused and the other co-conspirators had been distributing the pills to the South Dakota’s drug dealers under the fentanyl drug trafficking scheme. Furthermore, the prosecutors had stated that the accused had manufactured and mailed nearly 200 packages bearing over 2.6 million pills to various addresses in 32 different states. It is believed that the accused have been earning somewhere between $25,000 and $35,000 per week from his role in the fentanyl drug trafficking conspiracy.

“This defendant was selling millions of poisonous, home-pressed Fentanyl pills to people all over the country,” Ronald A. Parsons Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of South Dakota, said in a written statement. “He was caught because of some great police work done right here in South Dakota. This case demonstrates the dramatic, national impact that federal, state and local law enforcement, working together, can have in getting these poisons off the streets.”

The U.S. District Judge named Karen E. Schreier, who had sentenced the accused has reportedly described this incident as the most massive fentanyl conspiracy case that she had ever seen in her courtroom. The authorities had also elaborated the incident as an example of how the investigators with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) have been helping in the dark web investigations that involve the sale of narcotics.

“This investigation reflects the successful teamwork between the United States Postal Inspection Service and our law enforcement partners with bringing to justice those who use the dark net and the U.S. mail to distribute illegal narcotics. Postal Inspectors have been at the forefront of dark net investigations for years, bringing to justice those who use the U.S. mail to distribute illegal narcotics behind the dark net’s false veil of anonymity. We continue to challenge the anonymous nature of the dark net, proving you are never truly anonymous,” stated Ruth Mendonça, Inspector in Charge of the Denver Division, of the United States Postal Inspection Service, covering the State of South Dakota.

Source: DOJ

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