Criminals set up fake online pharmacies to sell deadly counterfeit pills, prosecutors say

A network of illegal drug sellers based in the United States, the Dominican Republic and India packaged potentially deadly synthetic opioids into pills disguised as common prescription drugs and sold millions of them through fake online pharmacies, officials said. federal prosecutors said Monday.

At least nine people died of drug poisoning between August 2023 and June 2024 after consuming counterfeit pills, according to an indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court.

The indictment accuses the company’s head, Francisco Alberto Lopez Reyes, of orchestrating the scheme from the Dominican Republic, directing co-conspirators to create dozens of online pharmacies imitating e-commerce sites legitimate. The sites tricked customers into purchasing synthetic opioids – in some cases methamphetamine – disguised as prescription drugs such as Adderall, Xanax and oxycodone.

The counterfeit pills were sold to tens of thousands of Americans in all 50 states and to customers in Puerto Rico, Germany and Slovenia, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said at a news conference announcing the indictment.

“The websites the defendants created and the pills they distributed looked very real,” he said. “But that wasn’t the case.”

Williams said 18 people, including Lopez Reyes, were charged with crimes, including participating in a drug trafficking conspiracy that resulted in death. It was unclear whether Lopez Reyes had an attorney who could comment. No attorney was listed in online court records.

Authorities said the fake pills were made in New York with fentanyl smuggled in from Mexico.

Company members operated basement pill factories in the Bronx and Manhattan, where they used custom molds to press powdered narcotics into pills at a rate of up to 100,000 pills every 12 p.m., prosecutors said.

Law enforcement raided a pill mill in Manhattan on May 31, 2023, and seized more than 200,000 pills as well as bricks, bags and buckets filled with powdered narcotics, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors said that once the orders were delivered, the conspirators bombarded customers with calls and text messages urging them to buy more drugs. One customer had to block 30 phone numbers to stop this aggressive marketing.

One victim, a 45-year-old National Guard veteran identified as Holly Holderbaum, purchased what she thought were oxycodone pills in February 2024, according to the indictment.

Holderbaum received the pills in the mail on Feb. 20 and died five days later with 46 counterfeit pills at her bedside, prosecutors said.

The pills were composed of fentanyl and para-fluorofentanyl, a fentanyl analogue, and Holderman’s cause of death was acute fentanyl intoxication, prosecutors said.

Recent years have seen an increase in fentanyl-related deaths, including among children, in the United States. The most recent figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that more than 78,000 people died from overdoses involving synthetic opioids between June 2022 and June 2023, accounting for 92% of all drug overdose deaths. opioids during this period.

Anne Milgram, the administrator of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, who joined Williams at Monday’s news conference, called fentanyl “the most addictive and deadly drug threat we have ever faced in as a nation.”

“Fentanyl is cheap,” Milgram said. “It’s easy to prepare, and even small amounts can be highly addictive and deadly.”