Spam Nation by Brian Krebs Page B

those peddled by rogue online pharmacies, approved online pharmacies, and even Main Street vendors like CVS and Walgreens—come from chemical factories based in India and China.
    The problem isn’t that these drugs are produced outside North America for U.S. and Canadian consumers. The issue is that it’s unclear whether the suppliers that rogue pharmacy operations like SpamIt and Rx-Promotion use are supplying branded and generic medications to the supply chain for pills sold at legitimate and approved pharmacies in the United States and abroad—and, more importantly, whether the drugs they’re creating are safe or not.
    SpamIt pharmacies, for example, relied on pills bulk-shipped byat least forty different suppliers, but the vast majority of the medications sold via their spamvertized sites came from a half-dozen drop shippers in India and Hong Kong. According to information pieced together from the SpamIt affiliate database and the Stupin online chats, the top suppliers for SpamIt included Sai Balaji Enterprises and Hemant Pharma (doing business as “Chinmay Overseas”), both from Mumbai, India. Other top suppliers for SpamIt included Trans Atlantic Corp., based in Hong Kong, and Shri Kethlaji Traders in Sumerpur, India.
    The trouble is that the GlavMed-SpamIt order fulfillment system appears to have selected suppliers and drop shippers automatically based on which one recently bid the lowest for the class of drug the customer is seeking. The spam pharma companies have no idea whether these drugs are safe for consumer consumption—or whether they’re even the real drugs or fake ones stuffed with potential poisons and toxins like what killed Marcia Bergeron.
    In short, customers who order drugs from spam may be playing a dangerous game of Russian roulette.
    Digging deeper, I discovered that GlavMed kept scrupulous records of customer service complaints and requests. Thousands of complaints from customers appeared in the leaked GlavMed database, yet relatively few of them pertained to the quality of the drugs that were delivered. Rather, most complaints were about delays in receiving the ordered drugs or were lodged by customers who received the wrong medications or were unhappy with how the drugs were packaged.
    One exception was a transaction made by Deborah G., a resident of the United Kingdom. Deborah ordered weight-loss drugs and other items from pillaz.com—a site advertised by a spammer working for Igor Gusev’s GlavMed affiliate program. According to the GlavMed customer complaint database, the pills that Deborah ordered sent her to the emergency room. The London resident described herself as a forty-three-year-old woman who weighed more than two hundred poundsbut who had no allergies or current medications. In 2010, she paid $437.39 (not including shipping) for a veritable medicine cabinet of prescription drugs, including:
    • One hundred eighty (20 milligram) tablets of the anti-obesity drug Acomplia.
    • Sixty doses of Xenical, a drug that blocks the absorption of fat in certain foods.
    • A three-month supply of Hoodia, an organic weight-loss supplement.
    • Four tubes of acne-fighting tretinoin cream.
    Not long after ingesting her new pills, Deborah fell into a deep depression and had to be admitted to the hospital after she began to feel sick to her stomach. Suspecting that the tablets she’d received from her online order may have been tainted, she brought the drugs to a lab to have them professionally tested.
    “On testing, they discovered they were completely fake,” Deborah said in her emailed complaint to GlavMed’s customer support team. According to Deborah, the lab results revealed that some of the pills contained a variety of inactive and decidedly hostile ingredients, including poisons, cement, and talcum powder.
    Deborah later lodged a threatening complaint at the site from which she’d ordered.
    “I want ALL my money back. I will gladly post back the tablets, and no further