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Our Members: Continuing the Fight Against Rogue Online Pharmacies

Prescription Pill Bottles with Pills

This blog post is the second in a two-part series. For part one, click here.

This summer is an ideal time to reflect on our members and their efforts to combat rogue online pharmacies and educate consumers. In the first part of this series, we covered key policies of our registrar members to address the challenge of illegal online pharmacies, more search engine warnings, new helpful resources for consumers, and referrals that were made to law enforcement officials. Below is a recap of the additional hard work of our members, and the positive developments in their fight against illicit online pharmacies:

  • Search engines who are members of CSIP, such as Yahoo, Google, and Bing (Microsoft), have tightened their policies to prevent these rogue sites from participating in their advertising programs. Recently, Bing made additional policy changes that make it more difficult for rogue Internet drug outlets to advertise, demonstrating the search engine’s commitment to patient safety.
  • Our members, Google and Microsoft, implemented comprehensive pharma-related advertising policies, including a zero tolerance for illegal, unsafe or deceptive medical or pharmaceutical advertisements.  Google blocked 780 million “bad ads”, an increase of almost 50 percent from the previous year, and made thousands of referrals to law enforcement about rogue online pharmacies.
  • Our payment services members are working cooperatively with law enforcement officials and both have robust monitoring programs that routinely search the Internet for sites purporting to accept payment by branded cards in exchange for illegal prescription drugs.
  • Our member organizations and partners have been actively involved in consumer education efforts, such as our Times Square public service announcement – a joint campaign with the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies Global (ASOP Global).

CSIP is grateful for our members for their hard work, and collaboration with partners and law enforcement. We are encouraged by their continued efforts to educate the public and to ultimately make online pharmacies safer for consumers.

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The Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies (CSIP) and our 11 member companies have the shared goal of helping address the growing problem of consumer access to illegitimate pharmaceutical products on the Internet. Continue to read this blog for updates on CSIP’s education, enforcement and information-sharing efforts.