When Aaron Shamo was running a multimillion-dollar pill-pressing operation out of the basement of his Utah home in 2016, he told himself he was doing something good.
Facing a federal jury on Tuesday, he testified that he was receiving positive messages from people who told him they couldn’t get pain pills from their doctor, and his product was helping them. People loved the drugs he sent, he testified.
But at that time, he said he had no idea how addictive the knock-off prescriptions pills were that he made with the help of friends and then sold on the dark web.