Posts Tagged: Rx-Promotion

A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars / The Coming Storm / Web Fraud 2.0 — 34 Comments
25
Feb 11

Pharma Wars

How do you chronicle the struggle for control of an underground empire when neither combatant wants to admit that he is fighting or even that that a war is underway? That’s the nature of a business-feud turned turf-war that is playing out right now between the bosses of two of the Internet’s largest illicit pharmacy operations.

On Thursday, I wrote about an anonymous source using the pseudonym “Despduck” who shared a copy of the back-end database for Glavmed, a.k.a. “SpamIt”, until recently the biggest black market distributor of generic pharmaceuticals on the Internet. The database indicates that Glavmed processed in excess of 1.5 million orders from more than 800,000 consumers who purchased knockoff prescription drugs between May 2007 and June 2010.

Despduck first proffered the Glavmed data through a mutual source in the anti-spam community, and claimed that the alleged owner of the pharmacy program, a Russian businessman named Igor Gusev, would soon be charged with illegal business activities. Sure enough, near the end of September 2010, Russian officials announced a criminal investigation into Gusev and his businesses. Shortly after those charges were brought, SpamIt.com was closed down. Consequently, the volume of spam flowing into inboxes around the world fell precipitously, likely because SpamIt.com affiliates fell into a period of transitioning to other pharmacy networks.

Gusev is now in exile from Russia; he blames his current predicament– and the leak of the Glavmed data — on his former business partner, fellow Muscovite Pavel Vrublevsky. The latter is a founder of Russian e-payment giant ChronoPay, a company Gusev also helped to co-found almost eight years ago (according to incorporation documents I obtained from the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce — where ChronoPay was established — for a time Gusev and Vrublevsky were 50/50 partners in ChronoPay).

As reported in my story earlier this week, tens of thousands of internal documents and emails stolen from ChronoPay and leaked to key individuals suggest that Vrublevsky is managing a competing online pharmacy network called Rx-Promotion. It turns out that the Glavmed database was stolen at about the same time as ChronoPay’s breach.

Vrublevsky denies being the source of the purloined Glavmed/SpamIt database, but the bounty of leaked ChronoPay documents suggests otherwise. Included in the email records are messages sent to and from an inbox that used the display name “Kill Glavmed.” What was the email address tied to that name? “Despduck@gmail.com,” the very same address used to communicate with my anti-spam source.

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A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars / The Coming Storm / Web Fraud 2.0 — 35 Comments
24
Feb 11

SpamIt, Glavmed Pharmacy Networks Exposed

An organized crime group thought to include individuals responsible for the notorious Storm and Waledac worms generated more than $150 million promoting rogue online pharmacies via spam and hacking, according to data obtained by KrebsOnSecurity.com.

In June 2010, an anonymous source using the assumed name “Despduck” began an e-mail correspondence with a key anti-spam source of mine, claiming he had access to the back-end database for Glavmed, a.k.a. “SpamIt”, until recently the biggest black market distributor of generic pharmaceuticals on the Internet.

Source: M86 Security Labs

If you received an unsolicited email in the past few years pimping male enhancement or erectile dysfunction pills, chances are extremely good that it was sent compliments of a Glavmed/Spamit contractor or “affiliate.” According to M86 Security Labs, the sites advertised in those Glavmed/Spamit emails — best known by their “Canadian Pharmacy” brand name — were by far the most prevalent affiliate brands promoted by spam as of June 2010.

Despduck said he could deliver data on hundreds of thousands of consumers who purchased pills through Glavmed’s sizable stable of online pharma shops, as well as detailed financial records of Glavmed/SpamIt affiliates who earned thousands of dollars of month promoting pharmacy sites using spam and hacked Web sites.

After many months of promising the information, Despduck finally came through with a 9-gigabyte database file that contained three years worth of financial books for the massive illicit pharmacy network. My source shared the data with several U.S. law enforcement agencies, and ultimately agreed to share it with me.

The database reads like a veritable rogues gallery of the Underweb; In it are the nicknames, ICQ numbers, email addresses and bank account information on some of the Internet’s most notorious hackers and spammers. This huge cache of information shows that over the course of three years, more than 2,500 “affiliates” earned hefty commissions promoting Glavmed’s pharmacy sites.

In total, these promoters would help Glavmed process in excess of 1.5 million orders from more than 800,000 consumers who purchased knockoff prescription drugs between May 2007 and June 2010. All told, Glavmed generated revenues of at least $150 million.

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A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars / Web Fraud 2.0 — 65 Comments
21
Feb 11

Russian Cops Crash Pill Pusher Party

I recently returned from a trip to Russia, where I traveled partly to interview a few characters involved in running the world’s biggest illicit online pharmacies. I arrived just days after the real fireworks, when several truckloads of masked officers from Russian drug enforcement bureaus raided a party thrown exclusively for the top moneymakers of Rx-Promotion, a major e-pharmacy program co-owned by one of the men I went to meet.

Chronopay founder Pavel Vrublevsky, at his office in Moscow

Within a few hours of my arrival in Moscow, I called Pavel Vrublevsky, the founder of ChronoPay, Russia’s largest processor of online payments. For years, I had heard that Vrublevsky was known online as “RedEye,” and that Rx-Promotion was using ChronoPay as the core credit card processor. Unlike other rogue Internet pharmacies, Rx-Promotion’s claim to fame is that it is one of the few that sells controlled substances, such as addictive painkillers like Oxycontin, Oxycodone and Codeine over the Internet without requiring a prescription.

Late last summer I came into possession of a mountain of evidence showing that not only is ChronoPay the core credit card processor for Rx-Promotion, but that Vrublevsky also is co-owner of the pharmacy program and  that ChronoPay executives have steered the pharmacy’s activities for some time.

In mid-2010, ChronoPay was hacked, and many of the company’s internal documents were posted on random LiveJournal blogs and other places that were mostly shut down shortly thereafter. But a much larger cache of tens of thousands of ChronoPay e-mails, and thousands of recorded phone calls and documents were siphoned from the company and distributed to a handful of people, including me.

Among the few others who have these documents is Igor Gusev, an early co-founder of ChronoPay and the man now charged by Russian officials as the owner of a competing online pharmacy affiliate program called Glavmed. Gusev is currently trickling out the leaked ChronoPay documents in a Russian language blog about Vrublevsky called Redeye-blog.com, mainly because he believes Vrublevsky was responsible for helping to bring the charges against him.

I told Vrublevsky that I’d also received the cache of stolen data, and as a result he has been calling me almost daily for the past eight months. His goals: To keep tabs on my activities and to learn tidbits about others in his industry. But most of all, Vrublevsky has acknowledged he’s been hoping to feed me tips that would lead to other stories that aren’t about him or what’s in those documents.

Some of what he’s told me has checked out and has indeed been useful. Yet, now that I’ve had time to pore over these documents and emails in detail (almost all of them are in Russian), a much clearer picture of Vrublevsky and his businesses is beginning to emerge.

My analysis indicates that in 2010 alone, Rx-Promotion sold tens of millions of dollars worth of generic prescription drugs (mostly to Americans), including millions of controlled pills that have high resale value on the street, such as Valium, Percocet, Tramadol, and Oxycodone. And yes, buyers are getting more or less what they’re seeking from this program, contrary to popular perception (more soon on how I know that).

I hadn’t told Vrublevsky that I was coming to Russia before I arrived on Feb. 8. But I wasted no time in phoning him via Skype, using the line he normally calls me on several times a week.

“Duuuuuuuudddde!,” he answers. “It’s 7 a.m. where you are, who died?”

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