Though MarkMonitor's data are far from definitive, the company's study raises a disturbing point.
MarkMonitor's study analyzed 2, 986 sites hawking major pharmaceutical brands pulled from its pool of spam e-mails.
At the time of the early-September study, MarkMonitor found 1, 100 listings on eBay for those four toys.
MarkMonitor also sifted through three business-to-business exchange sites--Alibaba.com and Made-in-China.com, and iOffer, which sell products to retailers.
The MarkMonitor study found around 340, 000 instances of "cyber-squatting, " or registered domains intended to impersonate a legitimate brand.
MarkMonitor spokesperson Te Smith puts down much of the success to better marketing.
On top of spam campaigns, MarkMonitor analyzed more than 11, 000 search engine ads associated with the same six drug brands.
"These kind of criminal businesses are drawn to selling online for the same reasons as legitimate businesses, " says Fred Felman, a spokesman for MarkMonitor.
That's the finding of a study released Tuesday by brand abuse tracking firm, MarkMonitor, measuring the disturbing growth of counterfeit drug sales on the Web.
MarkMonitor isn't the first to notice the problem of ineffective recalls.
Despite assurances that financial transactions on the sites were secure, more than half the sites that MarkMonitor tracked offered no protection of users' credit card data.
At the time of the early-September study, MarkMonitor found 1, 100 listings on eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ) for those four toys.
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Analyzing more than 60 million spam messages linking to 7, 090 sites, MarkMonitor tracked the six most commonly advertised drug brands, a list that the company declines to reveal.
Brand-tracking software and consultancy firm MarkMonitor set out to track down the Web sales of four toy brands that have been recalled in recent months by toy makers Mattel and RC2.
MarkMonitor's Fred Felman agrees that while manufacturers and online selling sites could be more vigilant about tracking recalled products, the burden of protecting children from toxic toys falls on the consumer.
MarkMonitor's study shows that 44% of the sites advertised in drug-selling spam were hosted in the U.S. China hosted 18% of the pages, while the former Soviet states gave rise to another 12%.
"This is the equivalent of a death penalty for a Web site, " admits Fred Felman, a spokesperson for MarkMonitor, one of the brand management and security firms that would be accredited by the program.
The online pharmacy study is the latest update to MarkMonitor's quarterly Brandjacking Index, which tracks the abuse of corporate brand names in online scams designed to steal credit information, drive traffic to advertising sites or sell counterfeit goods.
This year saw the widespread adoption of a tactic for hiding malware delivery sites known as "fast flux, " says Laura Mather, a researcher at the Anti-Phishing Working Group committee and a senior scientist with digital brand protection firm MarkMonitor.
Brand-tracking software and consultancy firm MarkMonitor set out to track down the Web sales of four toy brands that have been recalled in recent months by toy makers Mattel (nyse: MAT - news - people ) and RC2.
Using the traffic tool Alexa as a rough estimator, MarkMonitor found that pharmacies included in Alexa's top 100, 000 sites--about a third of the pharmacy sites the researchers traced--now each receive about 99, 000 visitors daily, more than triple the 32, 000 daily visitors per ranked site last year.
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