Revealed: Fake Online Pharmacies Thriving Despite DEA Crackdown

On February 20, 2024, a 45-year-old United States Army National Guard veteran visited a pill identification website, where she searched "M 30 blue and round." The woman, who had who served for 12 years, thought she was buying the painkiller oxycodone, and the website indicated that pills with these features were oxycodone. The decision to buy them proved fatal.

Five days later, her mother found her unresponsive in bed with 46 of the pills at her bedside. Emergency services were called. When they arrived at the home, the woman was pronounced dead. Testing later revealed the blue pills were made of fentanyl.

The unnamed victim was one of nine people listed in a September 2024 federal indictment against 18 defendants. These defendants, located in the United States, Dominican Republic and India, allegedly advertised, sold, manufactured and shipped millions of deadly pills marketed as legitimate pharmaceuticals via nine websites. These sites were seized by federal investigators, putting a stop to their illicit pill peddling.

However, months later, many unlicensed pharmacies purporting to sell pharmaceutical drugs to unwitting customers are still thriving despite the efforts by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to stop them. These include nine websites that appear to be linked to one of the nine that federal authorities previously identified and seized.

Marya Lieberman, an analytical chemist at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in the detection of substandard and falsified pharmaceuticals, said regulators face a daunting task to remove these illicit sites.

"To protect patients, DEA and FDA try to identify fake pharmacy sites and shut them down, but it's like playing Whac-A-Mole—as soon as they take one site down, another one pops up," she told Newsweek.

The Illicit Drug Market

The issue of drug safety has come to the fore as more Americans than ever turn to online pharmacies. According to a December 2023 survey by the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies Foundation (ASOP Foundation), 52 percent of American consumers have purchased medications from online pharmacies, up 10 percentage points from 2021.

Increasing demand for online pharmaceuticals has in turn raised concerns about the reputability of those who dispense them. ASOP Foundation found that 20 new illicit pharmacy websites are created every day and, in a 2024 survey, found that 54 percent of respondents mistakenly believed that all online pharmacies are FDA approved.

In fiscal year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized 1.5 million counterfeit medicines, making pharmaceutical items the biggest category of seized counterfeit goods.

Lieberman said counterfeit websites have become more popular because the types of medicines that are advertised are often drugs people can't afford through legitimate avenues, drugs they can't get prescriptions for, or products for conditions that people are really embarrassed talking about with their doctor.

"The rising utilization of these types of gray market sources can indicate that the health care system is not working well. If people do not have health insurance, lack access to primary care doctors, or can't get into treatment for substance use disorders, they may turn to illegal online pharmacies because they have nowhere else to turn," she said.

In October 2024, following the indictment, the DEA issued a public safety alert warning about the increase of illegal online pharmacies selling counterfeit pills made with fentanyl and methamphetamine.

Despite increasing federal action, Newsweek has found at least 14 online pharmacies that say they supply drugs to U.S. customers and appear to be illegitimate while computer forensic researchers have found hundreds more.

This search was non-exhaustive. While Newsweek did not attempt to order products advertised as pharmaceuticals on the websites it found to verify whether the vendors dispatch the products advertised and, if so, whether the products sold were authentic, or whether the websites are online scams, the websites Newsweek found all failed to comply with guidance from the (FDA) about how to verify a legal internet pharmacy. They also had other features suggesting they were untrustworthy.

FDA guidance says bona fide online pharmacies always require a doctor's prescription, have a physical address and telephone number in the U.S., are licensed in the states in which they operate and do business in, and have a licensed pharmacist on staff.

In response to a request for comment, a DEA spokesperson said: "In our Oct 2024 public safety alert, DEA warned Americans of the dangers of online pharmacies. DEA encourages all Americans to remain vigilant when purchasing medications online. The only safe prescription medications are those prescribed by a licensed medical provider and dispensed by a trusted pharmacy."

Fake Websites

One website Newsweek found claims to sell a range of products from anxiety, diabetes and sexual health medications at cheap prices. While the website shows images of normal-looking pill packets and provides an email address and two phone numbers, it has no business address or license listed. It accepts payments in cryptocurrency. There is also no record of its business name on a database of online companies and its website is registered to a private domain in Holland, obscuring its true origin.

Another website is registered to a domain in Russia in 2017 and claims it has been in business for 16 years. Two other separate websites appear to be linked. They have nearly identical information on their "About Us" pages and use the same contact number despite posing as different businesses registered in different countries.

Another website domain is registered to a redacted domain in Belarus while two separate websites claim to be part of a registered company in Canada that doesn't exist, according to a corporate database. One of these two websites lists its business address to a site in New York City that is New York University property. Another website claims it has been in business for 16 years, but its website was registered in 2023. Another website is registered to a private domain in Iceland.

Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama, launched in 2024 a project identifying websites that offered opioids without a prescription. He told Newsweek his team found 997 of such websites, 260 of which have since been shut down. He said that the 737 that are still online include some which are likely to be scam websites that do not sell drugs at all, though they appear to accept payments.

Warner also found that some of these websites appeared to be linked. Seven websites that received 52 deposits between June and November 2024 used the same Bitcoin address for payment. Newsweek found that all of these websites are still active.

According to Warner, this Bitcoin address also sent $6,780 to another payment address associated with 12 other websites, including one the DEA seized, in their October 2024 criminal investigation. This Bitcoin address received $164,097 in 289 deposits. Of these 12 websites, nine are still functioning. Aside from the one that the DEA seized, two failed to load.

'I Should Be More Afraid'

One patron of these businesses is a 21-year-old from Ohio. He said he purchased the epilepsy drug gabapentin from an online pharmacy in Mexico using Bitcoin as a payment method. Speaking to Newsweek under the condition of anonymity, he said he buys the drugs to manage his social anxiety and for "fun." He added he hadn't questioned whether the pharmacy he used was real or not.

"I should be more afraid but at the end of the day if I'm taking drugs for fun I can't complain about my safety much," he said.

Shabbir Safdar, the executive director of The Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM), a coalition of 45 nonprofit groups working against the counterfeit drug trade, said that international cooperation is needed to combat these websites including by locking domain names based in other countries.

"There is definitely more crime than there are resources to chase them," he told Newsweek. "You can't arrest your way out of this problem. You can only make it harder for the criminals to do their job."

Meanwhile, Lieberman added that regulations to make it harder for customers to find sellers and pay them, and for sellers to ship pharmaceuticals, "requite resources" including "people employed to regularly troll eCommerce and social media sites for fake pharmacy sites, and issue takedown orders."

Libby Baney, senior advisor to ASOP Global, said that most urging consumers to be wary was not a sufficient public health strategy, noting that studies have shown that even trained pharmacists struggle to distinguish legal from illegal pharmacy websites.

"We need new laws and aggressive domestic and international enforcement to curb the illegal online sale of counterfeit and unapproved drugs."

Correction 2/18/25, 11:36 a.m. ET: This article was updated to correct the spelling of Libby Baney.