Drug companies conducting private sting ops to collar pharma counterfeiters

Overseas manufacture and importation of pills that look like the real thing - but have different or no pharmaceutical value - has led Pfizer and other companies to conduct their own investigations and sting operations independent of legal authorities.

With a global security staff of 40 investigators, many of them former federal agents, Pfizer runs its anticounterfeiting operations from New York, London, and Hong Kong. Its investigators routinely make undercover buys from suspicious Internet sites in what Pfizer executives call ''surveys" of the market. The company then tests drugs it receives in the mail at a special lab it set up at its research headquarters in Groton, Conn.

When company officials think they have gathered enough information to establish probable cause for a criminal prosecution, they turn nearly complete cases over to foreign officials, US investigators, or local police.