MEDICAL SPAM PUSHERS

Dangerous medical spam is on the increase, thanks to legions of consumers who buy drugs from it.

Noticed how your inbox is filling up, rammed more than ever with medical spam, mostly of the erection-enhancing variety? Friends and colleagues all report the same problem, an unheralded deluge of the stuff in the past few months. It’s not just a blood-pressuring annoyance: doctors and regulators are warning that it’s an increasingly dangerous business.

Researchers are all saying the same thing - it’s our fault. People are buying things in response to being spammed. Just like junk mail, the spammers do it because it makes money. Recipients buy tablets for sexual performance, weight loss and body building.

It seems hard to believe that people actually send spammers money, but a recent survey in Network Computing claims that out of every 150 people who click on a spam drug e-mail, one buys something.

The problem has reached such proportions that doctors now ask patients whether they are taking medicines purchased online. One subscriber to Pharmacy Shark Patrol, JS from Ohio purchased a packet of Viagra-type erection pills that didn’t even match the unknown internet vendor’s original description. JS said "I bought ‘Viagra’ and I was sent Kamagra. I had no problem with the pills, though.”

JS was very lucky. The Pharmacy Shark Patrol (PSP), has spent years researching for trusted online pharmacies who delivery on time, with no cheating. In addition Pharmacy Shark Patrol obtains significant feedback from subscribers, online affiliate publishers and pharmacies themselves. There are always pricing issues, missed deliveries or quality checks that require PSP follow up on behalf of subscribers.

Some unscrupulous operators use fake pills. Robbie from UK mentions one of the Euro drug sellers online and thought it was "..wicked as the price was good. No joy. I was really sick and was in so much pain. I went to the doctor and he said that it wasn’t that dangerous, but it was some sort of filler that has really bad side-effects and may in the long term be bad for me; he told me to stop taking them (not that he needed to tell me).” Robbie, purchased from a pharmacy with a name closely resembling a well established pharmacy.

The bottomline - if you need to buy online at least checkout the credentials of the seller. Subscribe to Pharmacy Shark Patrol, it is free to join, research the PSP archives, view the lists of top online pharmacies and their performance ratings. Also, check out the avoid list of pharmacies. PSP lists the better pharmacies that will most closely replace the products sought from the avoid listed pharmacies.

Affiliate Support with Online Pharmacies.

It is good to see a responsible online pharmacy keeping its affiliates informed. See email below.
Also it is disturbing that hackers do such attacks to blackmail online businesses.

OPSecure Billing http://best-rx.com/affiliates.html are showing a determination to provide good service in both short term and most importantly the long term.

No longer accepting orders from call centers is a good move for online affiliates as chargebacks can close a business and leave us with out a supplier. It is a lot of time and money to build a great customer base and if a company closes then all that work is gone. So we invest our efforts with the companies that take a longer and constructive view of our working relationship.

The focus on non controlled lifestyle meds is a move that will support long term viability and therefore reliable income. This is also a great advantage in programs that offer life time customers.

Mel
DrugstoreBestBuys

Below is copy of their email
Subject Incident on August 10th



Dear Affiliate,

Last Thursday 08/10/2006 we were attacked by a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service). The hacker wanted US$10,000.00 to stop the attack. Not sure who in their right mind will accept this.

We had to pay a lot more to a company that specializes in protecting from this type of attacks and our service was restore at 10pm of that day. We were attacked again at 5am of the other day as the hacker figure out a way to bypass the protection. We put filters in place on our server so that the traffic is only accepted from the protection provider.

Some affiliates alerted us that they were not able to access our sites.
We figured out that there was a problem with the filters and that was corrected Yesterday. For some of you it might have seem that we were down for several days but if you check your stats you should see that it was business as usual.

Please also note that the high number of declines you see on your stats is due to some customers trying several times once they get the credit card decline message. You can verify this by looking at each order as you can see the name of the customer. Another reason is that we do AVS (Address Verification) and the billing address must match exactly as on the customer's billing statements.

We had big problems in the past due to charge backs introduced primarily by call centers. In order to reduce fraud we do not accept call centers and we put this measures in place. Charge backs can get you out of business.

We apologize for the inconveniences and rest assured that we are doing the best we can to provide you with the best.

We have started to drastically drop your base prices on non-controlled meds, starting with the most popular ones.

We are working on three new programs: non-controlled only, controlled diet pills with prior prescription and travel program with SYOP. We will make the announcements when the programs are ready.

Thanks for your business

Best Regards,
Frank Myers
Affiliate Support