The Easy Mark: How Roche Lost Millions in 3 Separate Cons

(MoneyWatch)  If there's one thing that Roche (ROG) can't see coming, it's a con man. On three occasions the pharmaceutical company has been victimized for millions of dollars in elaborate scams.

The cases highlight a conflict for customer acquisition managers: You want to make it as easy as possible for new customers to do business with you, but if you don't do the required due diligence, those clients could end up making you look foolish.

Consider Roche's experience:

• A British man was recently jailed for 14 months after he became Roche's biggest non-NHS customer for Xenical (the prescription version of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)'s Alli). He sold the drug through weight loss clinics without prescriptions, buying nearly ?£1 million's worth a year.
• Roche lost $300 million in annual revenue when it terminated a contract with Pharmed, a crooked Florida company that was buying drugs from Roche at cheap prices required by Puerto Rico and then diverting them for sale at higher prices in the U.S.
• Roche Diagnostics vice president Donald Dumoulin shipped $11.7 million worth of merchandise to grifter Dina Wein Reis after she convinced him he was running a non-profit operation. (The fact that he met with Wein Reis' associate, Sara Golden, "a marathon runner, who was smart, slim, and blond, with wholesome good looks," may have had something to do with it.)

Two of these three cons involved people who should have appeared as giant red flags for Roche. And yet ...

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