US authorities have seized "substantial sums" from 11 Allied Irish Bank accounts held by a $125 million illegal internet pharmacy.
This is the second time in recent months that US investigators have seized AIB bank accounts from US-Indian controlled internet pharmacies.
Bill Grant, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Agency in Washington, said that the agency did not know of a link between the two cases but was continuing to investigate.
In a consent agreement shown to The Irish Times, Ms Sabina S Chhabra-Farqui (30) from Weston, Florida, admitted opening 11 AIB bank accounts that were used to hide part of the proceeds of an illegal online pharmacy that sold more than six million units of prescription-only drugs.
A spokeswoman for the US Attorney's Office in Alexandria, Virginia, said that under the terms of the consent agreement it could not disclose the amount held in the AIB accounts but said the sum was "substantial" and at least ranged into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ms Farqui's brother, Mr Vineet K Chhabra (32), from Golden Beach, Florida, admitted last December that he was the ringleader of an enterprise that made $25 million a year and netted $125 million in total. He pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy and operating a criminal enterprise and faces 33 months in prison.
Mr Chhabra is now being sued by a Florida woman who says her husband died after consuming prescription-only drugs purchased on one of Mr Chhabra's websites.
The Chhabras' uncle has also been charged with managing the operation, while a pharmacist and four doctors with licences in Missouri, Ohio, Arizona and Virginia have been charged with allowing their names to be used by the group to sell vast quantities of drugs. One website, get-it-on.com, sold Viagra and related products, while others sold weight-loss products.
Ms Chhabra-Farqui opened the 11 AIB accounts on behalf of a front company called Chhabra International. The company itself has been charged with conspiracy, while Ms Chhabra-Farqui is under a one-year probation. She has also agreed to forfeit millions of dollars in property, cars and jewellery.
This month, the DEA arrested two men who ran an online pharmacy from Swords, Co Dublin, as part of a $20 million illegal internet pharmacy that also controlled by an Indian-American family.
US prosecutors say Rohn Wallace (37) and Mark Caron (38) both from Rochester, New York, moved hundreds of thousands of dollars through two AIB bank accounts to the pharmacy's ringleaders, 26-year-old student Akhil Bansal, the son of a pharmacist named Brij Bhushan Bansal, from Agra, India.
US authorities say that the Bansals were the ringleaders of the group. Five members of the Bansal family have been arrested in the US and India.
One of the AIB accounts was held by Mr Wallace and the other was a joint account held by Mr Wallace and a trading company called WCW.com. The money was transferred to the US between October 2004 and January of this year, according to the indictment.