Rx-Promotions, in case you have not seen the spam messages, is one of the world's largest pharma spam campaigns, having started in the summer of 2007, since when it is thought to have been responsible for billions of spam messages.
Infosecurity notes that the US Food and Drug Administration issued an official warning letter in October of last year about the emailed offers, advising US internet users to avoid any messages from this 'company'.
According to security researcher Brian Krebs, he recently travelled to Russia to interview a number of people – including one of the organisers of the RX-Promotions campaign – just a few days after "several truckloads of masked officers from Russian drug enforcement bureaus raided a party thrown exclusively for the top moneymakers of Rx-Promotions."
Rx-Promotions, he said, is jointly owned by Pavel Vrublevsky, the founder of the Chronopay e-money service, and Krebs says that he visited Vrublevsky at his office in Moscow.
In his report on the visit, Krebs says that, for years, he had heard that Vrublevsky was known online as 'RedEye' and that Rx-Promotions was using Chronopay as its core credit card processor.
"Unlike other rogue internet pharmacies, Rx-Promotions' claim to fame is that it is one of the few that sells controlled substances, such as addictive painkillers like Oxycontin, Oxycodone and Codeine over the internet, without requiring a prescription", he said in his security blog.
"Late last summer I came into possession of a mountain of evidence showing that not only is Chronopay the core credit card processor for Rx-Promotions, but that Vrublevsky also is co-owner of the pharmacy program and that ChronoPay executives have steered the pharmacy's activities for some time", he added.
In his security blog, Krebs says he had already told Vrublevsky that he had received a cache of stolen data, and as a result the Chronopay founder had been calling him via Skype on a regular basis.
Following his visit to Moscow and Vrubelevsky's office, Krebs says his analysis indicates that in 2010 alone, Rx-Promotions sold tens of millions of dollar’s worth of generic prescription drugs, mainly to US recipients.
During this visit to Vrubelevsky's office, the security researcher says that the Chronopay founder told him that his party at Moscow's Golden Palace was raided by the police.
During the raid, police were able to match Rx-Promotions affiliates' online identities to their real-world faces and names.
Curiously, Krebs also reports that Vrublevsky never showed at his own party.
"As he explains it, the day before his wife inexplicably pleaded with him to go on an emergency vacation to the Maldives. What's more, someone had the presence of mind to take down all Rx-Promotions logos from the rented party space hours before the police arrived", he said in his report.