Safe Online Canadian Pharmacies

About two million Americans buy medications from online Canadian pharmacies.

Researchers recently checked 11,000 such sites and found that only two percent were actually Canadian pharmacies.

Residents of certain states can buy prescription refills from licensed pharmacies in Canada and the U.K. at i-saverx.net.

A website called drugdeliver.ca says that a customer should always have contact information besides an email address for an online pharmacy.

"But it doesn't stop at the phone number because what a lot of online pharmacies are doing nowadays is outsourcing their call center to a third party whose primary job is just to take orders," it states.

The company should have a physical mailing address.

Next time you visit a pharmacy online be sure to click their "Contact" page and see what information they have available to contact them by.

Take a look at the top of the Internet browser to see the website address you are visiting to see if it looks like a reputable domain name with the "www" in front of the title.

If you visit a site that looks like a bunch of mumbo jumbo click the back button right away.

Another thing to watch out for are web addresses that are not using domain names at all but rather IP addresses such as http://204.37.84.153/viagra.htm.

This is not just laziness on the part of the pharmacy; this is done on purpose, according to Drug Deliver staff.

Other forms of ads are banner ads and affiliate sites and these all must be taken with a grain of salt.

If they are an affiliate you are likely to see other things in the URL that will allow the commission to be tracked like website.com/?affiliateID=12345.

Also, be careful because sometimes an affiliate URL will look like the above but then quickly redirect you to the main site in order to try and fool the customer.

This is not the be all end all of determining if a website is a scam but most of these websites all seem to share the characteristics of having less than 50 or 100 products in their inventory.

Also if the company doesn't charge you at all but has your credit card number, look out because they will try to sell your number to a third-party or parties.

Internet scams are not a thing of the past any time soon.