retailer. If an order was deemed suspicious, “we were immediately instructed to send them up to the fraud team,” the former worker said. “And if people had lost packages, we were to refer them to UPS or FedEx.”

To the extent that he ever considered the legality of the whole operation, Oz felt that RX Limited was working hard to comply with a confusing tangle of state and federal prescription-drug laws in the United States. For instance, a database held the order history for every customer and tracked the dates and amounts of their last purchases. If a new order showed up more quickly than a drug should have been consumed, the system was supposed to prevent that customer from getting a refill.

The company did at times encounter what Oz and his colleagues thought of as regulatory hitches. If a state changed its rules to ban the shipment of a certain drug, the system had to be adjusted to stop sending orders to pharmacies in that state. Occasionally, Oz would hear about American pharmacies being inspected by their state pharmacy board; they might go offline for a few days, then reappear in the system. But since the company didn’t deal in con- trolled substances, Oz was told that the law was not an issue. When prospective pharmacies complained about their cut of each prescription, $2 or $3, the pharmacy recruiters were prepared with their own script. “The reason we pay so low is that we are doing a legal business,” they were told to say. “If you are getting ten dollars you should save it for your bail because that means what you doing is illegal.”

Boaz and Tomer Taggart told their employees that they had a third, silent partner in the business—a programmer Tomer had met after posting an ad in an online forum. But Beit Oridan’s staff knew little about him, other than that he handled the technical infrastructure of the company, part of which he outsourced to contractors in Romania. To Oz, the setup didn’t seem out of keep- ing with the call center industry. The Taggart brothers ran the day-