Golden tips for online pharmacy . 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.

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.

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:

• We don’t want to talk to you and

• We want to remain anonymous

One important item to note is a website address. It should like a reputable domain name. for instance, something in the nature of http://www.drugconnectionrx.com/ instead of unreadable set of letters and symbols like this www.amiaminifg.net. 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 DrugConnectionRx.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Pay attention to the tracking number option. Like DrugConnectionRx uses UPS and provides Tracking Number on their own site. 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 (UPS,FedEx, DHL, USPS, etc).
4. 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. DrugConnectionRx 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 DrugConnectionRx with the latter promising “we will look into it for you”.