If you have a hazy recollection of a gold-plated Escobar-branded foldable from a few years ago, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. While the product announcement was very real (and very focused on a select group of popular tech influencers), the phone itself was every bit the scam it seemed to be on the surface — in fact, so was the entire company.
In the waning days of 2019, as Samsung finally released its fixed Galaxy Fold into stores, a smaller — but nevertheless eye-catching — brand announced its own plan for a gold-plated foldable. Escobar Inc. was a tech start-up founded by Pablo Escobar’s brother Roberto Escobar, and ran by Swedish CEO Olof Gustafsson, that promised to deliver gold-plated folding phones to customers for a fraction of the Galaxy Fold’s price. Oh, and flamethrowers too, because why stop at ripping off Samsung when you can also rip off Elon Musk’s Boring Company?
Needless to say, nothing this company ever promised was real, but that doesn’t mean this was your run-of-the-mill case of vaporware. As reported by Techspot, after making an initial splash online with the original “Escobar Fold 1” — a $350 rebranded Royole Flexpai — Escobar Inc. made its real impact with the Escobar Fold 2, thanks in large part to sending several devices to tech influencers like MKBHD. In fact, the video Marques Brownlee produced on the $400 foldable (which, once again, was a rebranded existing phone, this time utilizing either returned or damaged Galaxy Fold units) garnered attention from the FBI in June of 2020. Now, over five years later, this story finally has an ending.
Courthouse News Service reports that Gustafsson has pleaded guilty to “multiple counts of fraud and money laundering,” all stemming from the products promised by Escobar Inc. The scams pulled by the company under Gustafsson’s leadership are all pretty cut and dry: after selling a promised product at a ludicrously affordable price point, Escobar Inc. would ship their customers various promotional items or fake certificates of ownership, creating a mailing record to prevent customers from requesting a refund. Whenever a payment processing service did try to chase down a customer’s money, Escobar Inc. could present that tracking information as proof of delivery, thereby leaving the customer high and dry without their cash.
All products sold by the company — its $250 Boring Company flamethrower knock-off, as well as its various gold-plated iPhones and foldables — were, effectively, completely fake, with the only actual products ever arriving on the desks of influencers unwillingly playing a role in Gustafsson’s scheme. Thankfully, though, this story has a happy, if somewhat-delayed, ending. As part of his plea deal, Gustafsson is paying his victims $1.3 million in restitution, even forfeiting money held in his Swedish bank account.
He’ll be sentenced in Los Angeles on December 5th, and faces some pretty lengthy federal prison sentences for each of his six counts. Samsung’s real next-gen foldable, meanwhile, starts shipping at the end of this week.
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