Federal prosecutors announced on Sept. 30 that they indicted 18 drug trafficking suspects linked to a network that allegedly distributed synthetic opioids disguised as prescription drugs through fraudulent online drugstores.
Between August 2023 and June 2024, nine people died from taking the counterfeit medication.
According to an indictment unsealed in a Manhattan federal court, Francisco Reyes was the alleged leader of the operation in the Dominican Republic.
He allegedly directed his co-conspirators to run online pharmacies resembling legitimate sites that were promoted to sell Adderall, Xanax, and oxycodone, but were in fact methamphetamine and potent synthetic opioids.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said at a press conference on Monday that tens of thousands of Americans in all 50 states purchased these counterfeit pills, in addition to buyers in Puerto Rico, Germany, and Slovenia.
Reyes and his 17 alleged co-conspirators have been charged with narcotics trafficking conspiracy resulting in death, Williams said.
“The websites the defendants made and the pills they distributed looked very real,” Williams said. “But they were not.”
Law enforcement officials said the pills were made in New York using fentanyl sourced from Mexico in basement “pill mills” in the Bronx and Manhattan.
Using custom molds, the pill mills turned out 100,000 pills every 12 hours.
The indictment reported that on May 31, 2023, law enforcement officers raided a pill mill in Manhattan, seizing over 200,000 pills, as well as powdered narcotics.
The network allegedly engaged in persistent marketing to encourage customers to purchase the pills again, leaving one buyer to have to block 30 phone numbers to bring it to a stop.
Holly Holderbaum, 45, purchased what she believed to be oxycodone pills and died five days after receiving them in the mail on Feb. 20, with 46 of the pills found beside her bed, the indictment reported.
Prosecutors said her cause of death was acute fentanyl intoxication.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that from 2021 to 2022, rates of fatal fentanyl and other synthetic opioid overdose increased by 4 percent.
The CDC said that in 2023, more than 74,700 people died from overdoses of synthetic opioids.
Federal Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram called fentanyl a national threat.
“Fentanyl is cheap,” Milgram said at the press conference. “It is easy to make, and even tiny amounts can be highly addictive and deadly.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
