Complaint Review: IP-RXCONNECT / Canadian Pharmacy

I have been following this organization for several months now and am assisting in researching their technical infrastructure.

You can read an example here:

http://spamtrackers.eu/wiki/index.php?title=Canadian_Pharmacy

Canadian Pharmacy are a large-scale pharmacy spam operation with a particularly nasty habit of breaking into servers which they do not own so they can use them for things like web hosting, order processing and of course spamming people.

They are relentless at spamming as many email addresses as they can find. If you have an email address it is likely that you have received spam from this organization. There is absolutely no way to "opt out" of these spam lists, which makes sense since literally nobody has ever claimed to have "opted in" in the first place. They spam each address a number of times per day, and apparently spam hotmail.com email addresses even more frequently.

The spam messages tend to feature an embedded image which has been surreptitiously placed on a hijacked web server which they do not own, and features a link to a redirection page on a different web server which they have similarly hijacked.

That server in turn redirects to a final landing domain which is hosted on a series of hacked computers. It is believed that these computers get infected by some form of exe virus along the lines of the Storm Worm which has been written about quite a bit lately (August 2007.) They register no fewer than several thousand throwaway domains for this purpose, and they don't tend to last very long. On average a typical spammed website domain will last only a few weeks, but usually even less than that.

From there they claim to offer you inexpensive pharmaceuticals. Pretty much every single word of their websites is a lie, and as we've seen, at least one consumer never even received anything despite placing an order on one such site.

At the bottom of any of these sites they claim "Licensed by The College of Pharmacists of British Columbia." This is an outright lie. After contacting the actual College of Pharmacists of British Columbia, not only was I told that they in no way endorse these websites, I was further told that they may actually be responsible for several recent deaths due to people purchasing what they thought was legitimate pharmaceutical products to treat conditions such as liver disease, but which turned out to be completely fake, containing absolutely no medicinal content whatsoever. This is sadly NOT the only such pharmacy spam operation to be responsible for this activity. I was further told by a representative of the College that if I ever did find out who was behind this group, they'd definitely like to know about it.

All of their endorsements on the bottom of each of their websites are completely false. They are not licensed by anyone. They are not endorsed by anyone. They do not sell genuine pharmaceuticals of any sort, and they may be involved in credit card or identity theft. They don't offer any form of security whatsoever, yet claim to be authorized by Verisign as a secure, SSL website. More lies.

They additionally claim in the footer that "You may contact us at +1(210) 787-1711". That phone number is a land line located in San Antonio, Texas, and leads to a call center. If you call it and ask anyone there about why they spam people, or why they claim to sell drugs yet you don't receive them: they deny it outright and then hang up on you. Subsequent calls will never be answered.

Their FAQ page contains even more fabrications. Most notably this one:

Q: Are the products you offer FDA approved?
A: The products we sell are manufactured and shipped from India. All of them are approved by INDIAN FDA for export.

This is a ridiculous statement. There is no such organization. The US FDA strongly recommends *against* using these websites as they are run by an assumed criminal organization.

Needless to say: there isn't a single Canadian element to these websites. They just use the name as a form of branding.

In recent spam runs (August 2007) they have also begun co-opting the email templates of several legitimate email marketing campaigns, sending a full template for an email from a company like Kraft Foods or Best Buy, then throwing in their own image and link to supercede the output of the template itself. They do this to get around (specifically) hotmail.com's spam filtering. This has resulted in a large number of complaints to these companies from people who are genuine subscribers to their promotional campaigns.

In short: it is STRONGLY recommended that consumers stay as far away from these sites as possible. If you must purchase pharmaceuticals on the internet, do so only from licensed and authorized websites. The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy's (NABP) Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites Seal, also known as VIPPS Seal, gives a seal of approval to Internet pharmacy sites that apply and meet state licensure requirements and other VIPPS criteria. You can visit their website here

http://www.vipps.info/

SiL / IKS / concerned citizen

Sil
Toronto, Ontario
Canada