The pharma-spam syndicate

You know those spams in your e-mail trying to sell you discount drugs? Ever wonder if anyone is making cash from those? A recent Forbes article on pharmaceutical brandjacking illustrates just how easy it is to set up shop spamming people for discount (read: fake) drugs. How many pharma-spammers are there? Let's take a look at the numbers:

Analyzing more than 60 million spam messages linking to 7,090 sites, MarkMonitor tracked the six most commonly advertised drug brands, a list that the company declines to reveal [editor's note: try Viagra, Cialis, Ambien, Xanax, Oxycontin, and oh, let's say Valium...]. Given an estimated 0.5% sales rate and using the traffic measurement tool Alexa, the report roughly calculates that the most visited 3,000 sites alone drew more than $4 billion in annual sales.

Four billion in annual sales is huge. But is this a legitimate business model. No, it is most often fraud.

Though most of those 3,000 sites claimed certification as legitimate pharmacies, only four actually had credentials from the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy. The average cost of drugs on the uncredentialed sites was 75% less than on the legitimate sites, suggesting counterfeit, expired, stolen or diluted drugs.

To illustrate just how much the global market can get away with, the following paragraph (with links) is included:

Alibaba's offers include an Indian company selling Methadone and a Chinese supplier of a raw ingredient used in Ketamine. An advertisement from a Greek company on Tradekey offers a long list of substances like cocaine, ecstasy, codeine and heroin.

Nice tidy article about this booming new e-business model. Moral of the story: stay away from discount drugs online.