Washington, Dec 05: An Indian-American whizkid of the dotcom generation who is said to have raked in more than $125 million in the online pharmacy business was arrested and led away in handcuffs by US federal authorities on criminal charges of selling drugs and medicine in an unregulated manner.
Vineet "Vincent" Chhabra, 33, a big-time South Florida entrepreneur, faces a 108-count indictment issued by a federal grand jury in Alexandria. He is accused of using Internet web sites such as get-it-on.com and discreetdrugs.com to sell controlled substances like diet pills and tranquilisers without requiring customers to be physically examined by doctors, a mandatory requirement in most US states.

Also indicted are Chhabra's sister Sabina Faruqui, an uncle, Sunil Sethi, a Virginia pharmacist and physicians from Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky and Virginia.


"This case is about a dangerous new spin on an old problem," US Attorney Paul McNulty said in a statement. "Drug trafficking in cyberspace is just as harmful as drug trafficking on street corners. The advent of the Internet does not mean doctors and pharmacists can bypass rules." Are more stringent rules needed to curb drug trafficking on the Net?


Chhabra has been under investigation for the last three years, and his lawyer Sean Ellsworth said he looked forward to his day in court. If convicted, Chhabra faces a mandatory 20 years for the criminal enterprise and up to 20 years for money laundering.

The indictment also seeks to recover money from several dozen bank accounts connected with Chhabra, including accounts in India and the Bahamas, seizure of properties in the US, plus the forfeiture of 72 pieces of jewelry and 15 luxury cars - including five Mercedes, four BMWs and an Aston Martin. Authorities sealed the Chhabra residence, a $5.25 million ocean front house in Golden Beach.

The Chhabra situation, considered a test case for a government crackdown on Internet pharmacies and online drug sales, had been coming to a boil for several months now.

In October this year, DEA agents raided Chhabra's Rx Networks and seized stocks of diet pills and other drugs which were being distributed through a series of dodgy websites. The raids came after a Florida court and regulatory authorities upheld Chhabra’s rights to sell drugs online.

But federal authorities, concerned about the increasingly unregulated sales, kept bearing down on the operations, forcing Chhabra to adopt all sort of manouvres, including divesting and selling off his companies to entities in the Bahamas, to stave of prosecution.

In trying to stay legit and rake in big bucks, Chhabra had created a welter of companies and websites that authorities had a hard time keeping track of. His main web base was a company called USAPrescription.com, which in turn serviced scores of other websites such as discreetdrugs.com and bigmammarx.com.



Typically, customers just had to fill in a questionnaire online to be able to buy a variety of painkillers and diet pills, some of which could be resold as street drugs. In some cases where prescriptions were needed, the websites helped customers find an online doctor to do the job without a physical examination.

The Federal administration initially left it to the state governments to crack down on the practice, and some like Kentucky, punished doctors who wrote online prescriptions for Chhabra’s websites. But with the laws being spotty in many states, including Florida, Chhabra’s business flourished.

By one estimate, Rx Network alone was handling some 750 prescriptions a day, which at an average of $100 an order, was ringing in nearly $25 million annually. The problem had assumed such menacing proportions that the website Google recently stopped accepting unlicensed pharmacy ads.