Canadian Pharmacy

Description

This spam brand has the dubious distinction of being the most heavily spammed domain our staff receives.
The “Canadian Pharmacy” titled sites are the most common. They may also be labeled “European Pharmacy” for visitors from IP addresses located outside North America.

Other sites include “PharmSite” and “best online PHARMACY.” They are riddled with identical fraudulent claims.

For simplicity, this entry refers by default to Canadian Pharmacy, but the false claims apply equally to all of these.

The copyright statement in the trailers for “PharmSite” and “best online PHARMACY” actually contains the words Copyright Canadian Pharmacy.

Visitors to these sites are cautioned against placing an unsecure order for any of the products advertised. With so much obvious fraud in the set up of the web site, any reasonable person would be justified in having doubts about passing identity and credit card details to such blatant criminals.

False Pretenses

False: Verisign secure link claim

Both sites falsely pretend to take your credit card over a secure connection, but the protocol is unsecure http, and even in their fakery, they foolishly left the padlock image unlocked!

False: Claims to have “Pharma Checker” approval

The fraud continues. Both sites pretend to be authenticated by Pharmacy Checker – which they are not. So they set up a link to a fake Pharma Checker instead of the genuine Pharmacy Checker. Notice the fake logos on the left, compared with the genuine ones on the right.

False: Claim of “CIDA Rx” approval

The link to the Canadian International Drug Association is a very interesting innovation. No such association actually exists. The criminal who designed the site hoped nobody would notice the subtle name change from the real Canadian International Pharmacy Association.
If you click the link, you see that you are invited to “Report Unauthorized Seal Use”. In small print on the next line is a telling reference to “this CIPA Seal”. A click on that link opens an email to info@cidarx.ca. Everyone who sends off a report is probably identifying themselves via email to the criminal. A whois lookup on cidarx.ca is surprisingly brief, but does reveal that it was registered through Canadian Internet Registration Authority (NFP) / Autorité Canadienne pour les enregistrements Internet (OSBL)