based in Pennsylvania, but otherwise knew little about them, and never spoke to them. "Alphanet gave us copies of the physician licenses on file and we attempted to monitor that patients were not getting more than the physicians approved," Schultz said. The pharmacy rarely interacted with online customers aside from the occasional call about a refill gone missing, referred on to Alphanet customer service.

For Schultz, the business was everything Alphanet had prom- ised, and quickly relieved the pressures that had threatened his livelihood. His bank account began receiving wire transfers from a company called East Asia Escrow Limited in Hong Kong. Tens of thousands of dollars were pouring in monthly, and then weekly.

Someone at the top of all of this was clearly making tremendous amounts of money, Schultz thought. Who that might be, he didn't have the first idea. The Alphanet reps he talked to by phone, with names like "Will Morris," "Mike Gilmore," and "Sam Kent," never said where they were located, or how many people worked for the organization. Nor did they explain why the money came from East Asia Escrow, or mention that Alphanet was another name for RX Limited. Even if they had, to Schultz it would have been just another faceless online company—one that, by 2008, was putting millions of dollars into his bank account. "Alphanet said that its operation was legal and legitimate," Schultz said. "I wanted to believe them."

At the same moment Schultz was finding financial salvation at the end of his career, Dr. Prabhakara Tumpati was seeking some at the beginning of his. In 2008, Tumpati had just finished his resi- dency at Abington Memorial Hospital, in suburban Philadelphia, and was entering the medical field in the middle of a recession. Tumpati's road to becoming a doctor had been nothing short of extraordinary. He was born into a farming family in the remote In- dian village of M. Nagulapalli, and his first few years of education had taken place in a local school with a dirt floor and no electric-