but such companies typically consisted of banks of cubicles, filled with employees fielding customer service inquiries. In this case, Beit Oridan was part of a larger organization, a network of web- sites that went by the names RX Limited and Alphanet and sold prescription drugs to American consumers over the Internet.

In 2005, when Oz began working there, the company had eight American pharmacies operating in the network, taking eight thou- sand orders a week. It was growing quickly, with a recruitment arm that advertised for doctors on online forums like Craigslist, and solicited by fax and phone the kind of independent pharma- cies too small to build an online presence themselves. Within a few months of Oz's arrival, the number of employees doubled. Among the new hires was a slight, nervous man named Alon Berkman. Berk- man's primary responsibility, at least at first, was to provide support for "affiliate marketers," independent websites that advertised the drugs through email and search engines, and then referred customers back to RX Limited for a 60 percent cut of every order. Beit Oridan's employees were instructed to adopt American-sounding names and say that they were located in Utah. Oz's handle was Ron Martin; Berkman's was Allen Berkman.

Oz's job as operations manager didn't require any knowledge of pharmaceuticals, nor of the technological infrastructure behind RX Limited. He arrived each morning, quickly reviewed the pre- scriptions uploaded by doctors in the United States, then clicked a few buttons to send them on to one of RX Limited's pharmacies, allocating orders according to each store's daily capacity. The rest of the staff was responsible for recruiting and communicating with doctors and pharmacists, and for customer support: dealing with password problems, lost shipments, expired credit cards, and in- complete questionnaires. New hires were supplied with a "pitch," a standard script that told them how to respond to various cus- tomer complaints. "The majority of them were technical issues," one former call center worker said. "There were regulations that we had to be aware of in terms of people using certain drugs." The company also maintained a fraud team, like any legitimate online