PharmaLeaks: understanding the business of online pharmaceutical affiliate programs
Damon McCoy, Andreas Pitsillidis, Grant Jordan, Nicholas C. Weaver, Christian Kreibich, Brian Krebs, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage, Kirill Levchenko · 2012
Online sales of counterfeit or unauthorized products drive a robust underground advertising industry that includes email spam, “black hat ” search engine optimization, forum abuse and so on. Virtually everyone has encountered enticements to purchase drugs, prescriptionfree, from an online “Canadian Pharmacy. ” However, even though such sites are clearly economically motivated, the shape of the underlying business enterprise is not well understood precisely because it is “underground.” In this paper we exploit a rare opportunity to view three such organizations—the GlavMed, SpamIt and RX-Promotion pharmaceutical affiliate programs— from the inside. Using “ground truth ” data sets including four years of raw transaction logs covering over $170 million in sales, we provide an in-depth empirical analysis of worldwide consumer demand, the key role of independent third-party advertisers, and a detailed cost accounting of the overall business model. 1