'Canadian Pharmacy' spam - a nightmare for legit firms

Canadian Pharmacy spam that advertises cheap pharmaceuticals without the need for a prescription is one of the most notorious groups of fraudsters on the Internet. While the spammers continue to pump out their messages with new techniques, legitimate Canadian pharmaceutical companies often bear the brunt.
8/7/2009 6:00:00 AM By: Brian Jackson

To most people, Canadian Pharmacy means just another spam e-mail message promising cheap Viagra pills that is deleted in microseconds – but to David Zimmer, it's a reputation nightmare for his business.

Zimmer is the owner of Winnipeg-based The Canadian Pharmacy, a small company that legitimately sells pharmaceuticals over the Internet to American customers. In the U.S., drugs often cost much more than in Canada and there's a swath of businesses across the country that are

But when his company is confused with the almost identically-named spammer group, his reputation takes a drubbing.

“It's a big pain for us,” he says. He says he gets get inundated with complaints from angry victims of these spammers who haven't received their medication.

About once a day, Zimmer says he personally takes a call from an angry victim of the fraudsters. They've paid money and received nothing in return. When they go searching for someone to contact and blame, it's the legitimate companies they find.

The irony is Zimmer doesn't even do any e-mail marketing. He started his company in 2003, before Canadian Pharmacy spam existed.

“I've considered changing our brand,” he says. “When people confuse us with Canadian Pharmacy, that hurts our ability to market ourselves by word of mouth.”

Canadian Pharmacy is well-known among spam researchers. Run out of Russia by a company called Glavmed, it has been one of the more successful e-mail scams run over the last couple of years. Using thousands of randomly registered domains and constantly shifting spam message techniques, they continue to perpetrate fraud with impunity -- and there's very little victims can do.

The spammers shifted tactics again during the month of July, according to Sunny Vale, Calif.-based security vendor Fortinet Inc. They pushed spam out through Web 2.0 services such as Google Groups, and Tinypic, a photo and video sharing Web site.

“It's probably one of the most notorious spam groups,” says Derek Manky, project manager for cyber security and threat research at Fortinet. “Traditional spam filtering has become pretty effective against text, so image spam has become pretty popular.”

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