More than Half of all Sales to Rogue Internet Pharmacies Were Processed by the Top 7 Banks
The top seven card-issuing banks were processors for more than half of all medicine sales to the largest fake Internet pharmacies in the past four years.
Brian Krebs reports that sales data stolen from Glavmed, a Russian affiliate program that pays webmasters to host and promote fake online pharmacies, show that card-issuing banks are key to the success of these operations.
Says Krebs, “Recent findings highlight additional levers that policymakers could use to curb sales at rogue online pharmacies, by convincing the card-issuing banks to stop accepting these charges or by enacting legislation similar to that used to squelch online gambling operations.”
Krebs sorted the Glavmed database, including credit card numbers and buyer information for approximately $70 million worth of sales between 2006 and 2010, and then sorted the data by bank identification number.
Krebs’ analysis shows that major banks processed 55% of all orders to Glavmed between 2006 and 2010. Krebs believes this data under represents the actual quantity of sales processed through American banks due to card issuer mergers. Additionally, the data does not include the sales generated by Spamit.com, a sister program of Glavmed, which promoted rogue pharmacies via email.
Krebs interviewed Stefan Savage, a researcher at the University of California who has studied financial institution involvement in fake pharmacies and says that banks could stymie these illegal transactions by refusing to process them.
Says Savage, “If [card-issuing] banks were willing to adopt a blacklisting approach, there is absolutely no way these [fake] pharma outfits could keep up.”
In an interview with the founder of Glavmed, Igor Gusev, a fugitive from Russia, he said that merchant banks have the power to wipe out the fake pharmacy industry.
“I think it would be a very powerful strike, and online [rogue] pharma would be dead within two years if they could somehow switch off the merchants who [are] connected to online [rogue] pharma,” Gusev said to Krebs.