Banks Hold Key to Killing Rogue Pharmacies
Summary: Research on a leaked Glavmed database of nearly $70 million in sales between 2006 and 2010 found that at least 15 percent of purchases, about $10.7 million, were charged to cards issued by Bank of America, and that the top seven card issuers handled more than half of sales at the largest rogue Internet pharmacy over four years. Glavmed founder Igor Gusev, a fugitive from Russia, told KrebsOnSecurity that pressure on merchant banks would kill online pharma within two years, and after a University of California study the pharmacies moved processing from Azerigazbank to Bank Standard in Azerbaijan.
Why it matters: A handful of card-issuing banks and merchant processors carry the payment flow for a spam-driven drug trade worth tens of millions, and Gusev himself says switching processors takes a week at best and is visible in seconds - which is why a blacklisting approach by those few institutions is the lever that could end it.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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