According to prosecutors, criminals set up fake online pharmacies to sell deadly counterfeit pills

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

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

The indictment accuses the company's head, Francisco Alberto Lopez Reyes, of orchestrating the scheme from the Dominican Republic and directing co-conspirators to set up dozens of online pharmacies that mimic legitimate e-commerce websites. The websites lured customers to purchase 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, as well as to customers in Puerto Rico, Germany and Slovenia, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said at a news conference announcing the charges.

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

Williams said 18 people, including Lopez Reyes, were charged with crimes including participating in a drug trafficking conspiracy resulting in death. It was not clear whether Lopez Reyes had an attorney who could comment. No attorney was listed in online court records.

Authorities said the counterfeit pills were made in New York using fentanyl smuggled from Mexico.

Members of the company operated basement pill mills in the Bronx and Manhattan, where they used customized molds to compress powdered narcotics into pills every 12 hours at a rate of up to 100,000 pills every 12 hours, prosecutors said.

Police officers raided a pill factory in Manhattan on May 31, 2023, seizing more than 200,000 pills as well as bricks, bags and buckets full of narcotic powder, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors said that after 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 aggressive marketing.

One victim, a 45-year-old Army National Guard veteran named 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 of the counterfeit pills at her bedside, prosecutors said.

The pills were composed of fentanyl and parafluorofentanyl, an analogue of fentanyl, and Holderman's cause of death was acute fentanyl intoxication, prosecutors said.

There has been an increase in fentanyl-related deaths in recent years, among other things among childrenAcross the U.S. The latest figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that more than 78,000 people died from synthetic opioid overdoses between June 2022 and June 2023, accounting for 92% of all opioid overdose deaths during that period.

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

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