pharmacist in Oshkosh could tell, the whole thing was running smoothly. He was now making $4 a prescription filling online orders, and the two technicians he had hired at his stores, Schultz Pharmacy and Medicine Mart, were each filling as many as a thousand to fifteen hundred a day, enough to keep both pharmacies in the black. Schultz himself, who had been diagnosed with severe heart disease in 2007, had become a less frequent presence at the stores.

Employees at the two pharmacies would later say that the system seemed ripe for abuse. “I would see a husband-wife ordering, going to the same address,” one recalled. Sometimes they would reject prescriptions “if there wasn’t a diagnosis that made sense for the drug they were asking for, if they had received that medication recently, more recently than what they should be needing a refill for,” one pharmacist who worked for Schultz said. “If somebody was trying to secure medications with multiple names, we could figure that out. If somebody would have ordered drugs under John Smith and then J. A. Smith or Joe Smith, and they were all at the same address or same date of birth.” They would report abnormalities back to Ron Oz or other AlphaNet representatives, and move on.

If any of them had typed some of the AlphaNet websites that came attached to the orders into a search engine, they might have been doubly suspicious. AlphaNet, otherwise known as RX Limited, had been tracked for years by online organizations dedicated to stopping illegal spammers and shady pharmacies from operating on the Internet. A Portland, Oregon, company called LegitScript regularly included AlphaNet on its published lists of “rogue pharmacies”—operations that offered drugs without valid prescriptions. At one point, LegitScript determined that the thousands of websites affiliated with AlphaNet and RX Limited constituted half of all the rogue online pharmacies in the world.

But Schultz’s employees trusted that their boss knew what he was doing. “Occasionally we would get a call saying ‘I found this medicine in my son’s possession and it’s not from his doctor, can