Online pharmacy. What is it? How to buy? And how to protect yourself against it?

Online pharmacy or an opportunity to purchase a medicine you need without leaving your chair in front of your monitor and going to the nearest drugstore or chemist’s is a very popular business on the Internet space that intercepts heaviest portions of online traffic due to a number of advantages available with online drug order. However, in many cases such kind of shopping results in deplorable aftermaths that turn out at best to be useless medications and at worst malware infected PCs, lost money and damaged health. Our series of articles dedicated to the issues of Internet pharmacy scam represents a descriptive material in no way intended to make any accusations or abuse to companies or individuals. The main aim we pursue is to help Internet consumers protect themselves against the fraud that after all may cost them their lives.

General overview

While the main advantage people seek for, when they go online to order a medicine, is a convenience of requesting and receiving the item they purchased without the necessity to travel to a community drugstore, another most common option featuring some pharmacy websites is that they do not require a pre-written prescription. Thus, customers who want to acquire those pills or drugs they were denied by their doctors often go to these online drugstores with more ‘liberal’ policies than those accepted at authorized pharmacies that require doctor’s prescription. In some cases pharmacy sites offer their own doctors to review the medication request and write a prescription accordingly. While customers are persistently pursuing their right to buy whatever they want official agencies warn that only licensed doctors at reputed clinics can provide thorough report on the contraindications and aftermaths of the particular medicine and its influence on an individual patient and draw public’s attention to the law aspect of that kind of business.

The popularity of online pharmacies stems from one more important factor which is the price of such drugs. Many uninsured or underinsured people in the United States cannot afford buying medicine for themselves or their relatives within the country borders inasmuch as the US has no control of the drug prices unlike most of other countries across the globe. Purchasing medications abroad customers in the US can save up to 80% of their money as opposed to the cost they would have if they bought the same medicine in America. Major part of the drugs ordered and purchased online are coming from Canada, India, the UK, Thailand and other countries in South Africa.

In most cases pharmacies offering drugs without a prescription or a doctor’s review are fraudulent and illegal and which is more they may have nothing to do with the medicine industry at all and represent spam or malware agents.

Who’s there on the gateway?

Giving a strict and rough answer to this question we can say that there is nobody on the gateway of the Internet space to protect customers from online pharmacy fraud. Irrespective of the existence of some agencies and boards the pharmacy scam continues its plague all over the world. It is up to consumers themselves to protect their health and money against criminal Internet drug schemes. However, everything is not as grievous as may seem as long as anyway there is help available to Internet subscribers to detect fraudulent and fake drug stores and evade being entrapped.

State bodies created in the USA to regulate drug production, distribution and sale are not coping with the volume of the responsibilities imposed on them. What is the reason? LegitScript notes:

Actually, the government is trying to do something about the rogue Internet pharmacy problem. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has made it a priority, but unfortunately, the DEA only has jurisdiction over certain drugs called “controlled substances.” The Food and Drug Administration, and the State Boards of Pharmacy, are left to deal with the thousands of rogue Internet pharmacies – and LegitScript estimates that there are more rogue Internet pharmacies than there are investigators to deal with the problem!

While governmental and other authorized bodies are still unable to control the contraband or illegal drug traffic entering the borders of the United States these institutions still do a lot of useful work and we, ordinary people, can avail of their tips and guidelines that will help us to stay safe. Here below we give you reference to the agencies and entities where a common consumer can obtain thorough information on pharmacies operating on the Internet.

The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy® (NABP®) is the independent, international, and impartial association that assists its member boards and jurisdictions in developing, implementing, and enforcing uniform standards for the purpose of protecting the public health.

The purpose of the Association is to provide for interstate transfer in pharmacist licensure, based upon a uniform minimum standard of pharmacist education and uniform legislation; and to improve the standards of pharmacist education, licensure, and practice by cooperating with State, National, and International Governmental Agencies and Associations having similar objectives.
http://www.nabp.net/

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is responsible for the safety regulation of most types of foods, dietary supplements, drugs, vaccines, biological medical products, blood products, medical devices, radiation-emitting devices, veterinary products, and cosmetics. The FDA also enforces section 361 of the Public Health Service Act and the associated regulations, including sanitation requirements on interstate travel as well as specific rules for control of disease on products ranging from pet turtles to semen donations for assisted reproductive medicine techniques.

The FDA regulates more than $1 trillion worth of consumer goods, about 25 percent of consumer expenditures in the United States. This includes $466 billion in food sales, $275 billion in drugs, $60 billion in cosmetics and $18 billion in vitamin supplements. Much of the expenditures is for goods imported into the United States; the FDA is responsible for monitoring a third of all imports.
http://www.fda.gov/default.htm

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is a United States Department of Justice law enforcement agency tasked with combating drug smuggling and use within the U.S. Not only is the DEA the lead agency for domestic enforcement of the drug policy of the United States (sharing concurrent jurisdiction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation), it also has sole responsibility for coordinating and pursuing U.S. drug investigations abroad.

The DEA is headed by an Administrator of Drug Enforcement appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The Administrator reports to the Attorney General through the Deputy Attorney General.

The DEA has a registration system in place which authorizes medical professionals, researchers and manufacturers access to "Schedule I" drugs, as well as Schedules 2, 3, 4 and 5. Authorized registrants apply for and, if granted, receive a "DEA number". An entity that has been issued a DEA number is authorized to manufacture (drug companies), distribute, research, prescribe (doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants) or dispense (pharmacy) a controlled substance.

LegitScript, LLC is located in Arlington, Virginia. The company was formed in 2007. LegitScript Internet pharmacy verification standards have been recognized by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP).

LegitScript’s mission is to assist consumers and businesses in determining which online pharmacies operate safely and in compliance with Federal and state laws and regulations, as well as with accepted medical standards and ethics.

LegitScript’s PharmacyFinder allows consumers to find the right online pharmacy for them, based on a number of criteria, such as state where the online pharmacy is authorized to deliver prescription drugs, pharmacy specialty, method of payment, and other factors.

In July 2008, LegitScript and KnujOn released a report about 150 websites that offer to sell anabolic steroids over the Internet without requiring a prescription.

As of December 2008, LegitScript's website indicated that LegitScript had approved over 200 online pharmacy websites as meeting LegitScript's standards, and documented over 17,000 "rogue" online pharmacy websites.

In November 2008, LegitScript reported that it had shutdown 500 "rogue" internet pharmacies by complaining to their ISPs and domain registrars (such as Directi).

KnujOn, "no junk" spelled backwards and pronounced "new john", is a project involved in Internet security. KnujOn targets spam at its root, attacking the illicit activities that spammers soak their nourishment from. To that end, KnujOn runs an automated spam reporting tool.

KnujOn was founded in 2005 by Garth Bruen and his father Dr. Robert Bruen. A multi-purpose software tool called KnujOn has been presented at The Northeast Chapter of the High Technology Crime Investigation Association (HTCIA) in November 2005. That software, designed to filter junk mail and produce complaints that may result in shutdowns of scam websites, tracks Internet-based scams, and builds profiles of persons or organizations engaged in suspicious Internet activity by gathering and sorting large amounts of data.

Since then, KnujOn.com has been collecting spam samples from the public, not to build better filters or blacklists, but rather to use them for illicit site termination, to test the Internet's policy infrastructure, and gather important statistics. Their general goal is to target advertised illicit transaction sites and hopefully take the financial incentive out of the spam cycle.

These are only six agencies along with others existing on the Internet that can help you to navigate through the online market of medications and drugs. A reader may ask what KnujOn has to do with the pharmacy if it ‘targets spam at its root’. The answer will be more comprehensive in our second article where we will cover the close relations between online pharmacy and spam. Moreover a reader will see that Internet pharmacy is often tied to malicious applications.

What you should know

In protecting yourselves from illegal and harmful medicine treatment offered from the colored pages of online drug stores you need to always consult your doctors at first and then those six main entities that provide not only the standards and directives that help us to detect if the pharmaceutical web is legal or not, but also fresh and updated listings of the sites dangerous for users. Here we cite some vital things you should know when purchasing medicine via the Internet.

Federal law prohibits buying controlled substances such as narcotic pain relievers (e.g., OxyContin®, Vicodin ®), sedatives (e.g., Valium®, Xanax®, Ambien®), stimulants (e.g., phentermine, phendimetrazine, Adderall®, Ritalin®) and anabolic steroids (e.g., Winstrol®, Equipoise®) without a valid prescription from your doctor. This means there must be a real doctor-patient relationship, which by most state laws requires a physical examination. Prescriptions written by "cyber doctors" relying on online questionnaires are not legitimate under the law.

Buying controlled substances online without a valid prescription may be punishable by imprisonment under Federal law. Often drugs ordered from rogue websites come from foreign countries. It is a felony to import drugs into the United States and ship to a non-DEA registrant.

Buying drugs online may not be only illegal, but dangerous. The American Medical Association and state boards of medicine and pharmacy have all condemned the practice of cyber doctors issuing online prescriptions as unacceptable medical care. Drugs delivered by rogue websites may be the wrong drugs, adulterated or expired, the wrong dosage strength, or have no dosage directions or warnings.

In the interest of protecting patient safety, NABP recommends only those Internet pharmacies that are accredited through the Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites™ (VIPPS®) program. NABP has verified that these pharmacies are appropriately licensed, professionally operating, and have successfully completed the well-recognized and rigorous VIPPS criteria evaluation and on-site inspection.

The problem with buying medicine from foreign sources is that you never know what you’re getting. For instance, a Web site calling itself a “Canadian pharmacy” may actually obtain its medications from countries in Asia, South America, or Eastern Europe, where quality standards are more lax and counterfeit medications more widespread. While counterfeit medications can surface anywhere, they are significantly more common in developing foreign countries. 

Because the identity, purity, and safety of drugs purchased from foreign sources cannot be guaranteed, it is illegal (with very few exceptions) to ship prescription drugs that are not approved by FDA into the United States, regardless of whether the drug is legal to sell in another country.

More than 50 percent of Internet drug outlets, which conceal an actual address, have counterfeit drugs, according to the World Health Organization. Counterfeit drug sales are increasing at nearly twice the rate of legitimate drug sales and may expand to a $75 billion industry globally by 2010, according to the nonprofit Center for Medicine in the Public Interest.

How you can detect a scam


First of all you need to check their contact data. Usually illegal and unapproved organizations selling medicine through the Internet have no exact details related to their legal address, contact number and email. DrugDelivery.ca notes:

More than 90% of the online pharmacies out there do not list phone numbers or addresses and this lack of contact information says many things about the pharmacy:

1. We don’t want to talk to you and

2. We want to remain anonymous

One more important item to note is a website address. It should like a reputable domain name. for instance, something in the nature of www.yahoo.com instead of unreadable set of letters and symbols like this amiaminifg.net/HlvCGoiogpHkzl8FaT9sOfk6G/FBouNxwSAAYDDgclCxUeTAUD.htm. moreover, rather then using domain names some sites just provide links to their IP address: 204.37.84.153/viagra.htm. “This is not just laziness on the part of the pharmacy, this is done on purpose. By using an IP address the fraudulent website can easily move anonymously from server to server without any problem,” warns DrugDelivery.ca.

It should be added that most of illegal pharmacy sites use the services of the same domain registrars that have a shady reputation. That is why give yourself the trouble to check the domain registration with the whois service. LegitScrip cites the following registrars as dubious ones:

•    ABACUS AMERICA, INC
•    DSTR ACQUISITION VII, LLC
•    Dynadot.com
•    Everyones Internet, Ltd. dba resellone.net
•    eNom, Inc.
•    EstDomains, Inc
•    GoDaddy/Wild West
•    Parava Networks, Inc. dba 10-Domains.com

You should also pay significant attention to the source of where you learn about any Internet service like medicine selling. The absolute worst place to hear about any pharmacy is unsolicited email (otherwise known as SPAM). You shouldn’t as well be very trusting to banner ads and affiliate sites. As long as the Internet services advertising other sites are paid, they do not bother themselves with checking the legitimacy of the promoted products. So if they are being paid to refer you to a pharmacy, the only thing they care about is which pharmacy will pay them the most for the referral, not which pharmacy is the most legit.

Whenever you are visiting a site and are at a page where they are requesting information such as your credit card, make absolute sure they have an SSL certificate (little lock at the bottom right hand corner of your browser) present, because if they do not you are just asking for trouble. The lack of this symbol means that your information is being sent over the Internet in plain text, and anyone (including your ISP) could read it without trouble.

Pay attention to the tracking number option. Most legal sites provide the tracking numbers for the consumers’ orders and you should know some key factors in this regard to avoid potentially fraudulent transaction. Fake online drugstores will provide you with a tracking number, but the only way you can track the order is through their own website. They usually provide a number of falsified reasons as to why this may be, but that is beside the point. They just wait for your money so as to disappear after they received them. Make sure that whichever company you deal with will give you a tracking number for a service you can actually track yourself (FedEx, DHL, USPS, etc).

Remember that getting a merchant account (the ability to process MasterCard and Visa) is not an easy task, even for a legitimate website. Just having one is not a basis for legitimacy. For those fraudulent websites that are either too lazy or incapable of acquiring such an account, they will just throw up a website and “pretend” to charge you for the order. They will then save all your credit card details (and those of a few thousands other people) to be sold/used at a later date for some other types of fraud. After you place an order with any new company online, give your bank a call 2-3 days later and see if it was charged. If it has not been charged, you may want to call the company and find out why. Some companies may just charge you when the order is about to be shipped so it is not an immediate cause for alarm, but then again, you never know unless you ask.

But these are not the only criteria to determine the fake and fraudulent pharmacy sites. LegitScript and NABP have more factors and aspects to consider. Besides, there are some things we just cannot access. That is why in case you have some doubts you can freely contact LegitScript or NABP with the latter promising “we will look into it for you”.

Part II: http://ecommerce-journal.com/node/11994