Like many other companies, prescription drug marketers are beginning to take advantage of the extensive reach of the Internet to promote their products. FDA monitors the Internet to check the quality of the information provided, and encourages consumers to remain vigilant to separate the good information from the bad.

Search engines provide the viable platform to pharmacy sites and others selling drugs. Search for any top-selling drugs returns millions of pages. There is no clue to a surfer as to which one result is the genuine one and which one is a fake. These illegitimate pharmacy sites use SE techniques to gain top ranking and other methods like "cloaking" and "redirecting" to reach desired goal.

To illustrate further on this point, take a look at Frontierpharmacies.com example:

Frontierpharmacies.com operates a legitimate retail pharmacy and also has many of their own websites and affiliates. They are SquareTrade certified because they are a retail pharmacy. Now see how the scam process works for customers and affiliates.

They advertise incredibly low prices for customers and affiliates to lure them into their site. They also charge a $19.95 NON-REFUNDABLE Processing fee. Even with the processing fee, their prices are very low. Therefore, the customer thinks they are getting a good deal and place an order (and the affiliate makes a sale). Now here's the scam. They decline every order and just keep the $19.95 non-refundable fee. The customer is out $20, the affiliate makes no commission after sending the qualified traffic and Frontier keeps the $20 bucks for doing nothing in this scam.

They have been doing this for a couple of years are have been well covered in a number of OP affiliate forums and OP affiliate ranking sites due to the high level of customer and affiliate dissatisfaction.

Continued in Part-III