Girls, flamethrowers and Pablo Escobar.
That’s the dream Swedish conman Olof Kyros Gustafsson sold to fans looking for a piece of the infamous Colombian drug lord as head of a company that owned his persona and legacy.
But the fraudster known as “El Silencio” failed to deliver the wild Escobar-branded merchandise he marketed, earning earning him a four-year federal prison sentence announced Friday.
A Los Angeles court also ordered the 32-year-old Friday to give back the proceeds of his fraud schemes, totaling at least $1.3 million. He also has been fined $25,000.
Gustafsson previously pleaded guilty in July 2025 to a myriad of fraud and money-laundering charges.
He served as the head of Escobar Inc., which purported to sell products branded with the cartel king’s name and initials.
Its marketing materials showed scantily clad women holding flamethrowers and gold smartphones linked to the drug lord.
The flamethrowers were copies of Elon Musk’s “Not a Flamethrower” product from his Boring Company, according to Gustafsson’s plea agreement. And the phones were Samsung Galaxy Fold Phones wrapped in gold foil.
But consumers — except for some YouTube tech reviewers who spotted red flags associated with the gold phones — never received any products.
“Those people were getting scammed out of their money,” YouTuber Marques Brownlee said in a July 2024 video about Escobar Inc. “Honestly, in hindsight, I don’t know how they thought they were gonna get away with this. Like it felt pretty obvious to me.”
Brownlee said the FBI turned up and asked him for the gold phone and any communication he had with the company.
Officials said the products, outside of the promotional spots, never existed.
Instead of sending the products to consumers, Gustafsson sent a “Certificate of Ownership,” a book, or other Escobar Inc. promotional materials so there was a “record of mailing from the company to the customer,” the sentencing document says.
He had done that so the Escobar fans couldn’t receive a refund.
“When a paying customer attempted to obtain a refund when the product was never delivered, Gustafsson fraudulently referred the payment processor to the proof of mailing for the Certificate of Ownership or other material as proof that the product itself was shipped and that the customer had received it so the refund requests would be denied,” the document says.
The Swede kept the funds in overseas accounts in the US, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates.
Spain extradited him in 2023 back to the US, and he has been in federal custody since March 2025. He came to his plea agreement likely because he was facing a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for each fraud-related count and up to 10 years for each money laundering-related count.
In a March 2025 interview with Swedish outlet Aftonbladet, Gustafsson bemoaned Sweden’s lack of protection from Spain extraditing him. He had sought asylum in Spain to avoid extradition, according to the outlet.
“I think it’s terrible, Sweden does not extradite to the US, and Swedish authorities have not protected me at all,” he told the outlet.
He claimed the US was going to use “interrogation techniques” to “get information about Pablo Escobar’s family.”
Nevertheless, he said he “expected” to be extradited.
“But it’s no fun to go to a prison in the US by force,” he said.
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