PLoS Medicine tests out spam drug merchants

The headline on Science Daily reads "One-third Of Spam Is 'Health'-related," but the real news comes from the highly readable PLoS Medicine source article, "Will Spam Overwhelm Our Defenses? Evaluating Offerings for Drugs and Natural Health Products."

Peter Gernburd and Alejandro R. Jadad analyzed the spam in three different email accounts last November and came up with some startling results. Of the over 4,100 spam messages received, over 1,300 were "health"-related. Most of us, I assume, simply move these messages to our spam folders, and most of it goes there automatically. But Gernburd and Jadad actually analyzed each message.

Then they visited the spammer's web sites. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the sites weren't functional at all:

Nineteen messages had active Web links during the last week of the month. These messages had been received a total of 143 times by the accounts. Of these, 73% had been sent from the United States, 16% from China, and 5% from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Only 58% of the active links in health-related messages received during the first week remained active by end of the second week; while 26% were active by the end of the month.

So barely 10 percent of health-related spam actually contains a working link, and nearly all of those links disappear within three weeks. This is how these sites operate -- here today, gone tomorrow.

But the researchers went farther than that: They actually attempted to order medicine and "natural" health products from the few sites that worked. Here's what they were able to obtain:

• Cialis (erectile dysfunction)
• Meridia (obesity -- can increase blood pressure/heart rate)
• Tramadol (narcotic-like pain reliever -- addictive)
• Valium (anxiety -- addictive)
• Xanax (anxiety -- addictive)

All these drugs are supposedly prescription-only and should be taken only with a doctor's supervision. Despite the low rate of success accessing spammer's web sites, once the sites were accessed, the researchers found the drugs surprisingly easy to purchase:

Our findings show that it is possible to purchase products purported to be prescription drugs and controlled substances, across traditional national and legal boundaries, and that about one-third of the attempts to do so will be successful. This is a much higher rate than the previously reported 17% for generic attempts to purchase products from spammers. It is unclear whether this is a reflection of an increased level of confidence of spammers over the years, or a specific phenomenon related to health-related products.

According to the Yale University web site, all this spam really does work. People actually click on this stuff. A recent report suggests that "stock tip" spam causes a measurable gain in the stocks being hyped. So what can we do about it? Perhaps spam control will move in the direction anti-virus software appears to be headed: maintaining white-lists of trusted providers, instead of blacklisting the bad apples.