Pharmacy spammers capitalizing on Michael Jackson’s death
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
As rumors swirl that pop superstar Michael Jackson may have been killed by an accidental overdose of Demerol, Diprivan and other medications, it is ironic that shady prescription drug pushers are still abusing the King of Pop, even after his death.
That’s right. No-prescription pharmacy scammers are using Michael Jackson’s death as the bait in their latest spam e-mail campaigns.
According to the Xinhua news agency:
Computer security firms are warning users to be vigilant about spam messages capitalizing on the sudden death of U.S. pop star Michael Jackson. Security firm Sophos … reported that about eight hours after Jackson’s death, its experts witnessed the first wave of spam messages taking advantage of the breaking news in the subject line and body of the email.
In these messages, the spammers claimed that they have vital information about the death of Michael Jackson to share and asked for a reply … [Experts] said users should be wary of spam emails offering links to “news” or “pictures” of deceased celebrities, which most of the time will lead to websites touting pharmacy products …
The spammers have outdone themselves again.
We’ve always liked Google’s approach to distributing the news. Google News aggregates headlines from about 5,000 English-language news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together, and then displays them based on your keyword search or customized options.
If you are receiving unwanted e-mails from no-prescription pharmacies, particularly from the same source again and again, you obviously want to stop those messages from appearing in your inbox.
Many rogue online pharmacies aren’t technically “no prescription” pharmacies — because they do have physicians on hand who write prescriptions for patients based on what are called “remote consultations.”

