Reports of 150 web sites offering illegal steroids on-line

Two organizations offered up some sleuthing work to uncover Internet web sites offering steroids online.  Market Watch and Dark Reading cover the research by Legit Script and Knujon.

From Market Watch:

Kids at Risk: Report Identifies 150 Websites Selling Anabolic Steroids

'Pumped Up on the Internet' calls for action from ICANN, US-based domain name registrars

            
ARLINGTON, Va. and BOSTON, July 21, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- LegitScript.com, an online pharmacy verification service, and KnujOn.com, an Internet spam and criminality watchdog, have released an investigative report that identifies 156 websites engaged in the illicit sale of anabolic steroids.

          
Steroid abuse is part of the larger prescription drug abuse problem, which is the second largest drug abuse problem in the United States. The abuse of anabolic steroids is concentrated among youth and young adults. The websites identified in the report enable Web-savvy youth to easily obtain illicit anabolic steroids

"None of the steroid websites we reviewed required a prescription, and none used any sort of age verification service," said John Horton, President of LegitScript. "Studies indicate that youth and young adults are the most at risk for illicit steroid use, and these websites are just a fraction of those we identified selling these drugs."

A little hyperbole included the 'Kids at Risk' headline.  Who knows how many of these Internet drugs fall into children's and adolescent's hands (or muscles).  Dark Reading meanwhile gives us the following:

Several hundred Websites sponsored by U.S. Internet domain registrars, including the popular GoDaddy, are selling steroids illegally, according to two online fraud watchdog organizations. They have been discovered by two Internet anti-fraud groups.

KnujOn, which fights email abuse and online fraud, teamed up with LegitScript.com, which verifies licensed online pharmacies and exposes underground ones, to ferret out the steroid-pushing sites and domains. The Internet domains that sponsor such sites should seek to suspend them, the watchdog groups say.

The two organizations today published a report describing the steroid-selling sites and outing the registrars that had signed them up. “These are 'Schedule III' substances -- it is illegal to distribute them in the U.S. without a license, or receive them without a prescription,” says Garth Bruen, creator of KnujOn. “They are delivered via postal mail, FedEx, etc. ... and this also violates the law.”

The U.S. domain registrars cited are Abacus America Inc., DSTR Acquisition VII LLC, Dynadot.com, Everyones Internet, Ltd., dba resellone.net, eNom, Inc., EstDomains, Inc, GoDaddy/Wild West, Parava Networks, Inc., and dba 10-Domains.com, according to the report. One GoDaddy-sponsored site in the report, aarxpharmacy.com sells anabolic steroids, testosterone, and other controlled substances.

As of late last week, KnujOn said it had not gotten much of a response from the U.S. Internet registrars after alerting them of the steroid sites and asking them to suspend the sites. Only a few registrars responded -- and they refused to take action, according to KnujOn

It will be interesting to see if these reports can decrease the number of illicit steroids sales on-line.

Dark Reading goes on after the jump:

The report aims to shed light on the online steroid underground, as well as the role of the U.S. registrars in helping them to get Internet services. “This is about the extent of criminality on the Web, how specialized it has become, in addition to revealing questions about the quality of companies supplying Internet services in the U.S.,” says Bruen. “Do they see themselves as having a moral or ethical obligation to the public?”

The steroid-selling sites aren’t your typical phony online pharmacies. “With general RX sites, there is a lot of variety. Some are merely stealing credit card numbers, others ship knockoff or counterfeit drugs, and others sell diverted market product which is the real thing but may be expired, under dosage, or rerouted from its original destination.

“With the steroid sites, there is much more involvement in the trade. The sites are more personalized and not as cold as the fake pill sites,” Bruen says. “If you look through some of the steroid forums out there, people complain about lots of fake supplements on the Internet. The sites we're looking at claim to offer the real thing and no ‘bad’ versions.”