Bad actors are selling drugs such as cocaine and oxycodone through search engine loopholes, resulting in a rise in fraudulent online pharmacies that the FDA is aware of, but hasn’t taken down.
Kubapharm.com sells green Xanax bars, oxycodone powder, and fentanyl citrate — allowing a buyer to add as much quantity as they’d like to their cart without ever asking for a doctor’s prescription.
It purports to be an online pharmacy with a staff of “highly professional, state registered physicians” headquartered in California City, but a Google Maps search of the address shows a one-story home in a residential neighborhood.
In March 2022, the FDA issued a warning letter to the website giving it 15 days to address its various violations of federal law such as selling misbranded drugs, but more than two years later it’s still in operation.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the FDA to ask why this website, along with several others, including TrinexPharmacy.com, are still accessible to the public, but the FDA spokesperson said the agency does not comment on specific compliance issues.
“We vigilantly monitor the internet for fraudulent or unapproved products and have issued warning letters to stop the distribution of illegally marketed semaglutide and tirzepatide,” the FDA spokesperson said in an email.
Violations to the law include selling a drug without a prescription, marketing it without providing “adequate directions for safe use” and also selling “unapproved prescription drugs of unknown origin, safety, and effectiveness.”
These fake pharmacies have been an issue for law enforcement officials for years, greatly exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic as more and more people turned to e-commerce websites to get their prescriptions — not for illicit or recreational drug use.
But these rogue pharmacy websites are selling counterfeit drugs that are often laced with fentanyl coming from China.
“If the FDA believes there is a violation of federal law, including offering the sale of an unapproved or misbranded drug, the FDA may seek compliance by sending a warning letter informing the website operator they are engaged in illegal activity,” the FDA spokesperson wrote in the email. “If needed the FDA works with our federal law enforcement partners to take enforcement actions such as seizures, injunctions, or criminal prosecutions.”
Law enforcement cracking down on pseudo-pharmacies selling laced pills
The Drug Enforcement Agency issued a warning in September, informing people of the dangers of these rogue pharmacies. During Operation Press Your Luck, DEA officials uncovered that a 45-year-old Army veteran died after ingesting a pill she thought was oxycodone purchased from one of these fake pharmacy sites.
The Operation lead to 18 people being charged, 10 pill presses (used for turning drug powder into a tablet), 100 pounds of fentanyl, 625,000 fentanyl and methamphetamine laced counterfeit pills, and nine websites being seized — a result of a year long joint effort between Homeland Security Investigations agents, DEA New York team, and United States Postal Inspection Service.
“These website operators are going to great lengths to make the websites look like legitimate online pharmacies – they offer 24-hour customer service, post online reviews and safety facts, and offer deep discounts to deceive customers into believing they were buying from a reputable business,” the DEA wrote in its warning.
And these fake pharmacies are all top search hits on Google.
When the Washington Examiner typed in separate searches on Google “buy benzos” and “buy xanax” the top searches on the first page included a website posing as Penn Medicine Becker ENT and Allergy that really linked to a website selling controlled substances, several dental and orthodontic websites with linking to other sites selling drugs, and Curahealth.com, purporting to be CurahealthRx, linked to a website where a user can buy SSRIs and benzodiazepines without a prescription.
Since October 2022, there’s been an Adderall shortage. The Washington Examiner reported in September that the DEA, which is in charge of setting drug allotment quotas, has been largely uncooperative to congressional requests to alleviate the shortage. Although last month, the agency increased the production limit used for lisdexamfetamine, the amphetamine compound for Vyvanse, the supply of extended-release formulations of the drugs does not match demand.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and Healthcare and Financial Services Subcommittee Chairwoman Lisa McClain (R-MI) fear this shortage will drive people to purchase Adderall from rogue pharmacies.
“In times of prolonged shortage, patients in desperation may turn to sourcing their prescriptions outside of the regulated healthcare system,” McClain and Comer wrote to their letter to DEA Administrator Anne Milgram in September.
The Washington Examiner searched “buy adderall” into Google and found that unlike when searching “buy xanax,” the first page of search results linked to legitimate resources and pharmacies for refilling a prescription.
However, on the last page of the search results — page 14 — the Washington Examiner found a site where a buyer could purchase 30 mg of Adderall for $20 a pill and also oxycodone 30 mg for $30 a pill.
Drug Dealers are advertising cocaine on government websites
Drug dealers aren’t just creating phony websites. They advertise where to buy cocaine, ecstasy, methamphetamine, and other illicit substances on government, school, and research journal websites — many of which are accessible on the first page of Google‘s search results.
The video recorded by the Washington Examiner below shows how, upon typing the words “buy cocaine” into Google’s search engine, the official government Disaster Assistance site, which has a .gov domain, shows up near the end of the first page results. When clicking on the search result, the Washington Examiner was directed to the search page on Disaster Assistance’s website, which included instructions on where to go to buy cocaine, directing to a site advertising contact information on WhatsApp and Telegram. The Washington Examiner notified the Natural Disaster press office of its discovery.
Telegram has been at the center of concern for leaders and law enforcement agencies around the world as the messaging channel has become a hotbed for criminal activity.
“You don’t know who they are, where they are, but they’re selling drugs, and you usually use Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, alternative channels to get them, but it all started with a Google search,” Elie Berreby, founder of SEM King — a consulting company centered around organic search optimization — told the Washington Examiner.
The Washington Examiner made contact with six WhatsApp and Telegram accounts found from these government, school, and academic journal web domains and Google search results. Five of them exchanged cryptocurrency addresses, photos of the substances, and promises of delivery within the hour. The Washington Examiner did not purchase any drugs.
How drug dealers hijack search results on Google
Drug dealers will target official websites that already rank high on Google due to their authority and then utilize their “internal site search feature of a website that generates URLs that are indexable,” according to Pam Aungst Cronin, SEO expert and founder of Pam Ann Marketing.
When a search engine like Google indexes a URL this means it is saved into its database and can come up on search results.
This is known as Internal Site Abuse Search Abuse Poisoning, and it’s not hacking. It’s just one of many Black Hat SEO tricks used by bad actors to manipulate organic search results from Google. As of Oct. 16, Cronin has documented at least a dozen government and school websites that have had their internal search pages hijacked by bad actors.
But how can typing queries like “buy cocaine” that don’t exist on a website lead to it being the top results on Google?
Google has engine bots known as “crawlers” and “spiders” to discover new web pages, which it will then index or store into its database. Google will then “rank” — organizing the order websites will show up in — searches based upon a laundry list of criteria including domain authority, content relevancy, keyword optimization, and backlinks.
Backlinks are hyperlinks that take users from one page to another. The more backlinks a website has, the more trust and credibility it appears to have on search engine platforms.
“If a lot of people click on a website after searching for some exact keywords, and it happens dozens, hundreds, 1000s of times per day over multiple weeks, the behavioral signal is this must be relevant, so you have automated machine learning systems on Google’s end,” Berreby said.
Bad actors will create a program in which these bots will mimic human behavior while performing the objective of increasing a particular URL page’s relevance.
“Let’s say I want to become visible and relevant in the U.S., so I will have bots with IP addresses over let’s say 40 US states, typing the same things, queries and clicking exclusively on this specific page, on this specific result, and it creates a snowball effect,” Berreby told the Washington Examiner. “You have more and more backlinks being created, seemingly organically, so it doesn’t appear too fake and too artificial.”
Business Insider first reported the issue of drug dealers and other bad actors hijacking official websites last September, pointing to this being a result of a 2022 update within Google, which allowed many of the “user-generated” result pages to show up on Google Search.
Before the update, website owners could restrict Google from crawling the results of internal searches, but crawlers at the time were now automatically able to discern which pages were deemed important to index.
A Google spokesperson said its spam-fighting systems are highly effective. The spokesperson said that it blocks 40 billion pages of spam every day.
“Generally our systems are highly-effective in preventing spam from appearing in search results, and ranking high quality results at the top of the page,” the Google spokesperson shared in an email. “We encourage sites to prevent their internal search pages from being abused this way by blocking them from our results, as explained here.”
PLOS — a scientific journal — was targeted by bad actors who left a comment on one of their articles with instructions on where to buy meth. The comment included both a Whats App contact and also a website to visit. Upon being notified by the Washington Examiner about this particular URL page on its website, they took action in having the page removed.
When it comes to removing URL pages, Google referred the Washington Examiner to its page on reporting content found here.
“A citizen can complain to Google or complain to whatever website,” Brett Johnson, former US Most Wanted Cybercriminal turned cybercrime and cyber security expert told the Washington Examiner. “That website will remove that. They absolutely will, but the only thing that is going to happen is that sellers will go to another website and do the exact same thing again.”
Lawmakers target social media companies rather than search engines
Social media companies, including Meta and Snapchat, have been under the scrutiny of congressional hearings and legislation focused on curbing illicit drug activity for the past couple of years. However, there’s been very little conversation in recent years into the roles that search engines like Google and Domain Registrar Owners (the company that manages domain names) play in allowing drug dealers and other bad actors on their sites.
But back in 2022, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced the Domain Reform for Unlawful Drug Sellers Act— better known as the DRUGS Act. The bill would have required internet domain registrars like Verisign and GoDaddy to lock and suspend websites illegally selling drugs. As the bill is written, a trusted notifier like a state or federal agency or a chosen nonprofit organization would issue a warning letter to a site. The registrar would also be notified and would have seven days to suspend the site.
According to Berreby, cutting drug dealers off from their domain names is a major blow to their operations.
“Now they have to start from scratch,” Berreby said. “Don’t get me wrong, they have a copy of everything, but they have to create a new domain, new brand, new links coming from other websites to this new domain name.”
According to Berreby, when bad actors lose their domain name, they’re losing their brand name with customers and also the trust with search engines, thus dropping their ranking.
Right now, the Food and Drug Administration can send warning letters to websites suspected of illicit use, but Libby Baney, senior adviser with Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies Global, shared with Inside Sources in 2022 that these letters carry little weight like in the case of Kubapharm.com and multiple other websites listed on FDA’s website that are still accessible.
“Domain registrars are like the landlords of the internet,” Baney told the outlet. “They control the dot-coms and namespaces of websites. They have the ability to shut down bad tenants on those landing pages. Just like a landlord can’t keep a lease from a tenant using a house for drug trafficking, internet landlords should not be making money from criminals.”
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While drug overdose deaths may be decreasing, demand for drugs is higher than ever. In 2023, the DEA seized 79 million fentanyl pills — almost triple what the agency seized in 2021.
A person no longer needs to be savvy with the ways of the dark web. In just five seconds, anyone with a phone or computer can be connected to a drug dealer through a simple Google search.
