Legitimate Canadian pharmacies getting caught in the crossfire of e-mail spam
What if millions of spam e-mails were sent out every day with your name — or your company’s name — on them? What do you think that would do to your reputation?
Unfortunately, this is a nightmare that many legitimate Canadian pharmacies are living today.
As ITBusiness.ca reports:
“To most people, ‘Canadian Pharmacy’ means just another spam e-mail message promising cheap Viagra pills that is deleted in microseconds – but to David Zimmer, it’s a reputation nightmare for his business.
“Zimmer is the owner of Winnipeg-based The Canadian Pharmacy, a small company that legitimately sells pharmaceuticals over the Internet to American customers…
“But when his company is confused with the almost identically-named spammer group, his reputation takes a drubbing. ‘It’s a big pain for us,’ he says. He says he gets inundated with complaints from angry victims of these spammers who haven’t received their medication.”
The most frustrating part is, these spam operations aren’t based in Canada at all. The biggest, in fact, is the Russian-based organization that calls itself “Canadian Pharmacy.” It sends as many as 60 billion spam e-mails per day. It has been known to ship counterfeit and adulterated medications to unwitting consumers who order from its many sites.
Says Zimmer:
“I’ve considered changing our brand,” he says. “When people confuse us with Canadian Pharmacy, that hurts our ability to market ourselves by word of mouth.”
It doesn’t help matters that the U.S. pharmaceutical industry has taken advantage of the confusion and tried to tar legitimate pharmacies with the same brush as rogue spammers — a dishonest but effective PR ploy that has duped more than a few members of the U.S. news media.
