Over Half Of The Worlds ‘Rogue’ Drug Domains Issued By Just Two Registars

As anyone who has to fight their way through their inbox on any given day the week will tell you, the worst offenders when it comes to spam has to be all those pharmaceutical companies trying to sell you everything from Viagra to cancer cures.

What you might not know though is that over some of those hundreds of emails that pile in to your already overflowing email inbox come through domains being hosted by companies that know exactly what is going on; and regardless of the legalities they let those site that are the source of those emails to continue doing business.

Researchers at a company by the name of LegitScript, a group that tracks unlicensed sellers of prescription drugs, decide to see what they could find out about the domain hosting companies that let these sham companies conduct their business.

As it turns out LegitScript discovered that two domain registrars play host to over 50% of those ‘rogue’ prescription sites in the world. Of the two registrars the biggest is Internet.bs which has registered 33 percent of those sites with ABSystems coming in second with 17% of the rogue sites registered through them.

Internet.bs currently identifies itself as having about 450,000 domain names –– that’s just about 0.2% of the total 225 million that Verisign recently estimated exist. But about one in three rogue online pharmacies in LegitScript’s database are registered with Internet.bs. If anything, our figures may be low: an analysis of the “not recommended” online pharmacies listed by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy indicates that nearly 44% of those that are active and still online are with Internet.bs.

via LegitScript

The amazing thing was that no matter how LegitSCript tried to make its front company, Pay-Rx.biz, seem like it would do anything illegal it could in order to get customers and make money when it approached Internet.bs to register their domains with them the registrar didn’t blink an eye. In fact the people at Internet.bs did everything they could to get the business – regardless of legalities.

It’s no wonder we are constantly being pummeled by these ‘rogue’ drug sites when registrars like Internet.bs and ABSystems not only turn a blind eye to any illegalities but actively encourage the behavior.

via Ars Technica