Free Spam Nation by Brian Krebs Page B

world’s junk email, I knew it would take months, possibly years, of poring over the data coming in from the two competing rogue pharmacy programs. What I had discovered so far were small pieces of criminal activity here and there, so a lot more in-depth research and investigation would be required to build a watertight case against these guys and expose their malicious activities. I decided to focus my immediate efforts on reaching the people directly affected by these cybercriminals: customers who purchased and ingested pills from spam ads.
    Almost all of us have gotten pill spam or pharma spam at some point in our lives—those emails that show up in our inboxes, spam filters, and junk folders, offering cheap prescription or enhancement drugs. It may be less than shocking that about 70 percent of the transactions made through rogue pharmacy websites advertised by Gusev’s SpamIt and Vrublevsky’s Rx-Promotion were for male-enhancement drugs like Viagra and Cialis. Even GlavMed customers who did not order drugs to treat erectile dysfunction (ED) usually received penis pills anyway. So confident were these pharmacies in the power of their ED formularies that theyroutinely included two to four free samples of these pills with every customer order. 8
    For those of us who would never dream of ordering from an unknown pharmacy, this might seem like an obvious and unnecessary gamble. Why not just use an ordinary pharmacy? Indeed, I was intensely curious to learn what motivated people to engage in this apparently risky activity, and whether they were happy with their purchases—or if they felt they’d gotten ripped off. I thought that if I interviewed enough of these buyers and found that overall they did not get what they expected, exposing this reaction could help reduce demand and eventually drive the spammers out of business.
    Thanks to data leaks from both Rx-Promotion and GlavMed-SpamIt, I had the names, phone numbers, addresses, and credit card numbers of more than a million people who had bought spamadvertised drugs. Some of those orders were fairly recent, so I was eager to interview buyers who might still have some of the pills and could forward them to me for testing at a qualified lab to see what these consumers were really getting.
    I purposefully avoided calling customers who sought out and paid for knockoff Viagra and Cialis, partly because I thought that those who had come to these fly-by-night pharmacies to purchase drugs for more serious ailments and conditions would have more interesting and sympathetic stories to tell that would help me get to the heart of this issue: who was purchasing these drugs and why? But I’d be dishonest if I said my reporting wasn’t also influenced by an experience I had with an interviewee very early in the process of contacting buyers.
    Just a few days after I began phoning people who had purchased medications from GlavMed, I dialed the phone number supplied by a male customer who’d ordered Viagra. His wife answered instead.She broke down in tears when I explained that her husband had purchased generic Cialis a few months prior. She was not aware of this fact and said she couldn’t think of a reason on earth why he would have wanted it. After that mercifully short interview, I decided to avoid calling any other customer who had purchased only erectile dysfunction drugs.
    Over two months, I called more than four hundred people who had purchased pills from SpamIt. Most of those I reached either hung up on me or declined to be interviewed. But I managed to interview at least forty-five buyers who ordered everything from heart medication to antidepressants and pills to treat thyroid conditions. I began to get a clearer picture of who these people were, what their motivations were, and how their actions affect us all, even those of us who don’t open spam emails, let alone buy anything from them.
    Many people—particularly anti-spam activists—take an understandably dim view