Whitaker says he set up a fake Mexican online pharmacy selling steroids and human growth hormone. Google rejected it at first, but Whitaker claims that Google's ad executives then worked with him to find a way around the rules. Whitaker says he paid Google's advertising fees with a credit card provided by the feds.
Later, federal agents apparently set up other fake sites selling prescription narcotics, Prozac, and Valium without prescriptions, and bought Google ads for all of them. On one ad, Google ad execs allowed the feds to add the line "no prescription needed," according to the Journal's report.
Most damning of all, Whitaker told the Journal that he made phone calls in which he walked through the illegal parts of his fake Web sites with Google execs, and once told them that one of his clients wanted to become the biggest steroid dealer in the U.S. The calls were recorded.
