adCenter Blog

Microsoft adCenter’s Response to Legitscript and KnujOn’s Report

posted Fri, Aug 07 2009

This week, LegitScript, a 3^rd party company that advocates for the legitimate prescription verification of online pharmacies issued a report stating that Bing has shown several search ads for illegal pharmacies via adCenter, Microsoft’s search advertising platform. According to the authors, 89.7% of Internet pharmacy advertisements on bing.com were operating unlawfully at the time of their report.

Microsoft took these claims very seriously and upon learning of the report, our internal editorial teams took immediate action to manually review all pharmacy-related keywords and remove any policy violators. Microsoft’s policies clearly require online pharmacies who advertise on Bing to adhere to US laws.

Microsoft, along with competitive search engines use PharmacyChecker.com, an online pharmacy verification service, which is a competitor to LegitScript.com, to verify online pharmacy advertisers. Based on our initial findings, we believe the advertisers noted in the report found a way to work around the PharmacyChecker.com verification process after being validated to advertise on Bing. These rogue advertisers manipulated the system by “hijacking” and/or misusing landing pages. Our internal teams are continuing to investigate how these advertisers sidestepped the policy. We do not believe the violation percentage was truly 90% as Legitscript claims and believe it is substantially lower than this number.

Unfortunately, cyber criminals are motivated to conduct profit-driven attacks. In response, Microsoft is engaged in the ongoing fight to help people and organizations protect themselves

online. In this case, Microsoft is taking immediate action to determine how the system was manipulated and/or misused.

Our internal editorial and network quality teams are taking several actions to mitigate this situation, including:

Immediate fixes:

-- All pharma-related keywords have now been manually reviewed to sweep out any advertisers who are in violation of our policies

-- The editorial team is validating the claims in the report around “hijacking” and misuse of landing pages

Long term fixes:

-- The quality and editorial teams are reviewing our processes to document how these advertisers made their way onto our system. This documentation will likely lead to changes in process as well as product requests moving forward

We believe we have good mechanisms in place, but nothing is perfect. By working together with the online community to gather feedback we can continue to strengthen our detection systems so that criminals have no place on our networks.

Microsoft is diligent about fighting online crime and fraudulent activity. We’re also looking at this online pharmacy issue to see what more we can do with working with the industry, government officials and appropriate authorities from law enforcement, similar to the other work we do to fight fraud online. Many of you will recall the Eric Lam case back in June where we filed suit against suspected perpetrators in a massive click fraud scheme. With that lawsuit we clearly sent the message that Microsoft does not tolerate fraud and will take action to protect its network and advertisers. Nothing is more important than the safety of the consumers who search on Bing and the security of advertisers who do business with us.

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8/10/2009 - to clarify, updated "display ads" to "search ads".

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Comments

Thu, Aug 20 2009 08:33AM

Patti Clancy

It seems you are paying PharmacyChecker to do a job they are not capable of. If they were, your internal editorial team and network quality team wouldn't have to do their work for them. Why not just contract this work out to LegitScript, who obviously have a much higher success rate of stopping this kind of fraud. This is a very real public safety issue that should be dealt with seriously.
Mon, Feb 08 2010 01:01PM

Paula Vaughn

After doing some research on PharmacyChecker.com and LegitScript, it doesn't feel like both of them are entirely honest. LegitScript seems to be doing well searching for rouge pharmacies that PharmacyChecker is failing to find, but only for credit or profit.

I feel that the government should be involved with this. Americans should not have access to online pharmacies such as the ones LegitScript has stopped. The government should be extremely worried about what is happening with this, and shouldn't just let one or two 3rd arty companies handle it.
Mon, Feb 15 2010 09:47AM

The Truth

LegitScript is funded by the pharmaceutical industry and is attempting to prevent Americans from purchasing drugs from legitimate Canadian pharmacies. Their tactics are questionable and their data is biased and distorted. If you want an independent, unbiased consumer resource, go to Consumer Reports magazine, which endorses both licensed Canadian pharmacies and PharmacyChecker.
Sat, Feb 20 2010 04:57PM

Informed Consumer

I too believe that LegitScript is definitely funded/supported by big pharma. It is clear that they are pushing big pharma’s agenda (which is to maximize their profits and to protect their interests) at the sole expense of the American public. LegitScript tries to mask their motives under the banner of ‘consumer safety’ as they know this will resonate better with the public and also be better from a PR standpoint. It is quite a shame that they are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Americans. Given the rising healthcare costs in the United States, the American public needs viable and safe options for purchasing their medications. For many years now, legitimate Canadian-based mail-order pharmacies have provided Americans with safe and affordable drugs. LegitScript is trying to put an end to that quickly and quietly before the general public is truly aware of it. Pretty sneaky move.