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Email between the former police investigator and another ChronoPay employee about payment for Rx-Promotion affiliates. by Brian Krebs
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The online pharmacy spam in your email is probably coming from an online pharmacy organization with close links to organized crime and corrupt police in Russia.
The most actively promoted online pharmacies via spam are associated with Rx-Promotion.com, according to University of California at San Diego researchers.
Now new documents have revealed that Rx-Promotion.com, an affiliate network of rogue pharmacies, is associated with ChronoPay, the largest payment processor in Russia. While ChronoPay claims to be the PayPal of Russia, it makes a large part of its profits from illegal internet-based businesses, including promoting extreme pornographic websites, selling pirated music and movies, and is known for paying off police inspectors and working with nefarious banks.
Investigative reporter Brian Krebs has reported that evidence provided to law enforcement agencies has revealed that ChronoPay’s chief executive, Pavel Vrublevsky, is also definitively the criminal mastermind of this collection of illicit businesses, including the online pharmacies.
According to Krebs, Vrublevsky purchased a license for an Intranet service called “MegaPlan” which is a project management system he used to keep a track of ChronoPay’s “black” operations, including processing payments for counterfeit prescription drugs sold through hundreds of websites affiliated with rogue online pharmacy program Rx-promotion.com.
Delving into the MegaPlan, law enforcement agents discovered how ChronoPay employees tracked payments, ordered supplies, and ran advertising partnerships for Rx-promotion.com and other nefarious services, including “rape” pornography sites and other violent pornography, as well as pirated mp3s, and fake anti-virus software known as “scareware.”
Though employees used pseudonyms in the system, they forwarded the pseudonymic email to their actual ChronoPay email accounts, which allowed authorities to identify them.
The project management software revealed that the equal partners for the rogue pharmacy promotion program, Rx-Promotion, were Vrubelvsky and Yuri Kabayenkov. But in addition, a former Russian police investigator, previously in charge of a criminal investigation of Vrublevsky, was identified as being on the payroll.
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