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This all reads like the plot for a low-budget tech thriller movie. A bad, low-budget tech thriller.

According to Teri Thompson, Bill Madden, Christian Red, Michael O’Keefe and Nathaniel Vinton of the New York Daily News, outfielder Melky Cabrera “created a fictitious website and a nonexistent product designed to prove he inadvertently took the banned substance that caused a positive test under Major League Baseball’s drug program.”

The website, purchased by an associate of Cabrera’s from the Dominican Republic named Juan Nunez, cost a total of $10,000.

The product, advertised as a topical cream, was going to anchor Cabrera’s defense during his appeal.

But “baseball figured out the ruse pretty quickly,” a source familiar with the case told the Daily News.

Cabrera’s agents, Sam and Seth Levinson of ACES, have distanced themselves from Nunez and are claiming that the scheme was concocted without their knowledge. There’s no evidence that they’re lying, though Nunez has been hired directly by the agents in the past to obtain and deal with Dominican clients.

Federal investigators are now looking into the case, and it seems possible if not likely that Cabrera will be facing punishment beyond his 50-game ban from professional baseball. “If you engage in this type of activity,” concludes a well-informed source in the Daily News exclusive, “you do it at great risk to your livelihood.”