Protect
Yourself From Online Fraud
From: www.drugdelivery.ca
Being
in the online medication industry for over two years has taught us much, but one
of the most important lessons we have learnt is how to tell a scam pharmacy from
a real pharmacy. You must be very vigilant in determining who you trust when you
order online. We suggest you take note of the following.
Do they have contact information readily available?
Would
you trust your medications when they come from a company you can only ever contact
through an email address? 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
But it doesn't stop at the phone number,
because what a lot of online pharmacies are doing nowadays is outsourcing their
call center to a 3rd party whose primary job is just to take orders. This is important
to take note of because when a company outsources its call center they still separate
themselves from the customers and maintain their degree of anonymity. When you
combine this with the fact that they can pick up and move their operation literally
overnight; this is a scary thing indeed. This is not to say that all pharmacies
that outsource are fraudulent, it is just something to take note of when you are
doing your due-diligence.
The next piece of information you want to look
for is the company's physical mailing address. The only reason a company would
not provide this piece of information is to once again hide their true identity/location
and this is a very common indication of fraud.
Next time you visit a pharmacy
be sure to click their Contact page and see what information they have available
to contact them by. You may be very surprised.
Reputable Domain Name?
Take a look at the top of the Internet
browser to see the website address you are visiting, does it look like a reputable
domain name?
A reputable domain name is something like:
http://www.google.com
If you are visiting a site that looks something like:
http://amiaminifg.net/HlvCGoiogpHkzl8FaT9sOfk6G/ FBouNxwSAAYDDgclCxUeTAUD.htm
Then click the back button right away. These domain names
are literally there one day and gone the next. Does the above URL look like it
belongs to a pharmacy that is legitimate?
Another thing to watch out for
are website addresses that are not using domain names at all, but rather IP addresses
such as the example below:
http://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. Do you think they are notifying all
their previous customers of such moves?
How did you hear about the pharmacy?
Where did you hear
about the pharmacy? Obviously the best way to hear about any pharmacy is from
word of mouth but when you are online that is not always the case. There are so
many ways to advertise on the internet that weeding out the good from the bad
may seem daunting, but is rather quite easy. The absolute worst place to hear
about any pharmacy is unsolicited email (otherwise known as SPAM) and then next
worst would probably be pay-per-click (where pharmacies bid on keywords that you
search for), although if the pharmacy is bidding on pay-per-click through Google
Ad words (google.com) or Overture (yahoo.com, msn.com, etc) then they now are
required to participate in Square Trade (a licensing body that governs online
pharmacies and validates their legitimacy) before they can advertise. These pharmacies
are supposed to be legit, but the screening process for them are certainly not
perfect and on more than one occasion we have encountered known fraudulent sites
to pop up from time to time, so be careful!
Other forms of advertising
are banner ads and affiliate sites and these all must be taken with a BAG of salt.
To put it in perspective, those are all "paid" advertisements and there
is no one verifying anything they promote. The only reason one website would advertise
another website such as a pharmacy is to obtain a sort of commission in return.
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. Think about that next time you take another websites word for
a "recommendation".
How do you identify an affiliate site? A
good way is by the URL they are sending you too. For example, if a website was
going to refer you to another website they would normally do so directly as in:
http://www.website.com
However, if they are an affiliate, you are likely to see other parameters
in the URL that will allow the commission to be tracked. An affiliate URL could
be any of the following:
http://www.website.com/?affiliateID=12345
http://www.website.com/product/service.html?partner=12345
http://partner123.website.com/
Also be careful because sometimes an affiliate URL will look like the
above but then quickly redirect you to the main site (without the affiliate IDs)
in order to try and fool the customer. To determine if this is the case, right
click on the link you want to visit, copy the link, the paste it into your address
bar. This is the only way to determine EXACTLY where you are going and what incentives
are awaiting the referring website if you place your order there.
How many products?
This is not the be all end all of determining
if a website is a scam, but most of the scam websites we come across all seem
to share the characteristic of having less than 50 or 100 products in their inventory.
Make note of this when you arrive at the website, and make note of the fact that
it is a lot easier (and quicker) to throw up a 50 product site than a 5,000 product
site.
Is there a visible Internet presence?
How long has the site you are visiting been around? Is
anyone (other than obvious affiliates) talking good/bad about it? Here is a good
way to see:
Go to http://www.google.com
and type:
cache:www.website.com
site:www.website.com
link:www.website.com
(where www.website.com is the website you are researching)
This
will give you a few key pieces of information about the site. - When
(if ever) was the last time the search engine saw this site
- How many pages
of the website is in the search engine
- How many other sites are linking to
it
While this information can not be strictly used to tell legitimacy
of any website, it can be used to determine how long the site has been around.
If the site has many indexed pages and many other legitimate websites linking
to it, you know it has been around for some time. This is always a good sign,
since fraudulent websites typically don't stay around long enough to even be cached
by a search engine let alone have all their pages indexed.
SSL Security
In the day and age of Internet commerce you
would think that by now everyone passing personal information across the Internet
would be doing so securely, but sadly that is just not the case. 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. Is it really worth the risk?
Also be careful
about calling in to place your order, because most call centers (especially those
that are outsourced) will place the order over the exact same website you would
use online (secure or not), so if you think you are more secure over the phone
that is not the case. In fact, we prefer to use the Internet ourselves since you
never really know who the person on the other end of the line is and what they
are doing with your information after you hang up.
Tracking Information for Orders
Do the websites provide
tracking numbers for their orders? Most do, but there have been a few we came
across lately that were very suspicious about how they do their business. They
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. The goal of these websites
are to provide you with"hope" that the order is actually in transit
on the way to you. In the mean time they are waiting Visa/Mastercard to pay them
the funds (there is sometimes up to a month delay from the day you pay with your
credit card till the day the website owner receives their funds). Once these funds
have been received they simply disappear. Of course, maybe they will put extended
shipping times like 5-6 weeks to give them a little more time, but whatever the
case 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).
No charges at all
This actually happened to a few of our
customers and so we decided to update this page with the information. Believe
it or not, 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, but it's a start. 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.
Subscription Fees
Probably one of the most common questions asked when people call in are "Do
I pay any subscription fees to join your service?" There are quite a few
sites selling subscriptions to their "service" that would allow potential
customers to view lists of "legitimate" pharmacies carrying hard to
find products that have been "fully verified". So we signed up to one
of these websites to see just what they would offer (after all it was only $25),
and all they provided was a list of websites, nothing more, nothing less. So the
next step was to verify these websites against our list of SCAM resistant methods
and let's just say we were not surprised when almost all of them failed one criteria
or the other, especially the criteria of them all being affiliate related. One
thing we were surprised with was the recurring monthly charge even after we cancelled
the service. In fact, we had to cancel the card before those charges ended up
stopping, so needless to say use these services at your own risk.
Internet
Scams a thing of the past?
Not anytime soon. It seems no matter
how many times these pharmacies are shut down; they just keep popping up again
and again under different names with more and more ways to take your hard-earned
money. As long as it remains profitable for them to do so, they will always be
there. Knowing this is the first step in protecting yourself. The next step is
to have the latest tools and knowledge to weed through the good from the bad,
and that is what we are here to help you do. We will update this page frequently
with more ways to protect yourself online so be sure to bookmark us and check
back later.
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