14 DAY TRIAL // Security researchers from Cyveillance warn that tough competition is pushing large afffiliate marketing groups running illegal pharmacy websites to expand into the counterfeit luxury goods business.
Illegal online pharmacies, who offers drugs without prescriptions, have been around for many years and are some of the most profitable types of spam.
Unfortunately, despite these meds presenting a serious health risks by being counterfeits produced in India or China, people are still buying them from spam websites, keeping such businesses alive.
However, as more and more groups are joining the affiliate marketing market, the current spammers are finding it harder and harder to keeep a steady income.
As a result, many of them, in fact, entire spam networks, are looking into other alternatives, such as counterfeit luxury goods
Security researchers from Cyveillance, who monitor many large groups involved in this type of malicious activity, note that several of them bought into this new business model.
"Back in July we wrote about one such group and their expansion into new but equally illegal territory.
"This crew of Russian cyber criminals who traditionally specialized in illegally sending unapproved and sometimes counterfeit drugs to patients in the United States now announced their plans to offer counterfeit luxury goods. "Since writing that piece we have observed another Russian online pharmacy network announce a similar move into counterfeit luxury goods. They don’t want to miss out on the action," they write.
In total three large networks who were previously involved in illegal pharmacy schemes have now switched over to counterfeit goods.
One of them is in the process of moving its business to selling illegitimate software. The group is pushing fraudulent copies of "Windows 7 Ultimate" as discount software.
The website templates are the same as those for online pharmacies, so the websites still contain elements that link the two operations together.
Cyveillance notes that spammers are abusing the logos of legitimate companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Verisign, CNET or Autodesk, in an attempt to add legitimacy to the scams.