A Florida man is behind bars in New York, where prosecutors accuse him of spearheading a drug operation that involved hacking physician prescription accounts to fill thousands of orders on behalf of fake patients.
Devin Magarian, 21, was arrested Jan. 16 after allegedly working alongside an undercover cop to fill phony prescriptions for oxycodone through more than a dozen pharmacies in the state, court documents explain.
Prosecutors allege Magarian gained access to doctor's e-prescribing accounts and used a bot program to generate made-up patients that he would then order thousands of e-scripts for and send off to pharmacies. Those prescriptions would then be picked up by a team of runners working with the Florida man.
The Nassau County District Attorney's Office said the 21-year-old would make monthly trips to New York to carry out part of his multi-state drug operation. His most recent trip in January would be the one that lead to his arrest.
"This is one of the most complex and technically sophisticated drug operations I have ever witnessed," DA Anne Donnelly said at a Friday press conference. "The scope of it is absolutely shocking."
Donnelly said a pharmacist in Great Neck helped tip authorities off to the massive operation.
Magarian is accused of initially selling ninety tablets of oxycodone to an undercover cop with the Nassau County Police Department. The cop and defendant would build a relationship following that initial sale, eventually getting to the point where Magarian felt comfortable disclosing details of his operation to the cop, according to authorities.
The two would frequently communicate via Telegram, a cloud-based messaging system. In the charging documents, Magarian is accused of explaining to the cop that he "had transmitted the prescriptions to said pharmacies using the e-prescribing credentials of a physician who operated a practice in Tennessee without that physician's knowledge of permission."
Eventually, according to prosecutors, Magarian enlisted the undercover cop to fill prescriptions at a handful of local pharmacies in the area. In 15 instances between Jan. 4-9, the cop picked up orders at pharmacies across Nassau and Queens County; most of the orders were for 90 tablets.
"The defendant agreed to allow the undercover to keep seven full prescriptions of ninety tablets of oxycodone 30mg, as well as the one prescriptions of twenty-five tablets of oxycodone 30mg as compensation for filling the prescriptions," the charging documents allege.
Magarian then allegedly offered to sell the remaining prescriptions, some 630 tablets, to the cop for $14,500. Prosecutors claim the two met last week in New York City, where the money and pills were exchanged in a deal.
District Attorney Anne Donnelly announced Magarian's arrest and alleged crimes at a press conference on Friday alongside the NCPD and the DEA's New York Division.
A lawyer for Magarian said the 21-year-old has no previous criminal record, and he looks forward to having him exonerated.