ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses online pharmacies, businesses that rely on computers and the scale provided by networks in order to sell and deliver pharmaceuticals. Online pharmacies are both an enduring technology crime challenge, and a lens for understanding cybercrime. The chapter introduces the problem of illegal online pharmacies and the intense law enforcement efforts to end their operation. It explains the methods that such businesses use to promote their visibility in organic search engine results. The chapter presents data from an empirical experiment examining how pharmacies achieve top-ranked status in United States (US)-based, English-language search engine results. It discusses the problem of illegal online pharmacies, and explains why they are popular and used by US consumers. The turn to enforcement against intermediaries–companies that somehow facilitated the sale of drugs–demonstrates how intensive the problem of online drug sales has become. The economic model of web spamming and online pharmacies is important to understand the cybercrime challenge presented by drug sales.
