When you are suffering from an illness, or if you just need some pills to make your life better, ordering online can seem like the best option. While you can make great savings on your medications, there can be problems as well. We take a look at the things you need to think about when you are getting ready to purchase medication online. There could be more things to consider than you realize. Let’s take a look at the things you need to know.
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Risks
While shopping for anything online does come with some risks, when you are buying medication there is more to it. With most things you buy online, you only have to worry about parcels getting lost in the mail or stolen as they sit outside your front door.
However, with medication along with these risks, there are greater problems. You can face the following risks:
- Credit card fraud
- Low-quality meds
- Counterfeit pills
- Identity theft
These are just some of the problems you could be facing when you order medication online from an unreputable source. Let’s take a closer look at these problems and more.
Credit Card Fraud
You could buy your medication from a well-known high street pharmacy, where the cost of pills will be identical to the normal prices you pay in a retail outlet. However, since you are purchasing online, you’ll want to make some savings. And there are huge savings to be made.
When you are buying from a well-known brand, the chances of credit card fraud are going to be very low. But if you pick a cheaper online pharmacy, you stand a greater risk of fraud. This won’t be a problem with many of the pharmacies you could purchase from, but if you make a mistake you could end up losing money before you realize there is an unauthorized payment on your card.
Sometimes people have found purchases have been made on their credit card in countries they never visited after they have bought pills online. If you don’t know who you’re purchasing medications from, they could be located in countries you don’t expect.
For example, many times we have found pharmacies that claim to be Canadian drugstores when they aren’t. They might display Canadian flags and even have Canada in the name of the business. But when we looked into it, they are actually based in countries like China, Russia, Pakistan, India, or somewhere unknown.
When you make a purchase on a pharmacy like this, you could be giving your card details over to an anonymous person in an unknown country. Given those circumstances, it isn’t surprising that you are more at risk of fraud.
Low-Quality Pills
While the pharmacy might claim that they only offer the highest quality pills, the truth could be very different. If you don’t know where the pills are from, they could be manufactured by an unreputable company.
Would you want to take pills that were manufactured in unsanitary conditions by people unqualified to do so? Of course not, but this is exactly what you could be doing when ordering from some online pharmacies.
The pills might not even contain the correct ingredients they should. This could lead to adverse effects happening that you can’t anticipate. If you are already sick, the last thing you want is to take some pills that will make your situation worse.
It could be the case that the drugs don’t have enough of the ingredients they should. This under-treatment of your illness can make it seem like the pills are working when they aren’t. This will then lead to your condition getting worse without you or your doctor realizing anything is wrong.
If you find yourself in this position, you may find that your doctor needs to take more serious action to treat you. This can lead to more expense, a longer recovery time, or worse. Make no mistake about it, people die because of low-quality and fake medication.
Counterfeit Drugs
There is a large problem with counterfeit pills being sold online. These meds will arrive with you in packaging that looks like a genuine article. But while everything may look correct to you, the reality is the pills are not genuine.
There is simply no way of telling unless you are an expert when you have been sold counterfeit medications. Instead of the real thing, you might find that you’ve got some low-quality pills instead of the brand-name drugs you paid for.
Identity Theft
If you are giving your personal information to criminals located in an unknown country, you have to expect these details will be compromised. Your information could be sold to other criminals for various reasons.
You may find that your details are used by criminals to apply for loans you had no knowledge of. If this happens, your credit score will take a big hit for a loan that you didn’t take out.
Security Flaws
Whenever you give your details to a retail website, you should make sure that the site is secure. A valid SSL certificate should make sure your details are encrypted when they are sent from your computer to the pharmacy’s server.
This prevents hackers from intercepting these details and using them. We have seen that many scam online pharmacies don’t have the basic level of encryption to prevent your information from being stolen in this manner.
Dispensing Errors
It is very likely that a scam pharmacy won’t tell you where the pills are being dispensed from. This might mean that the people dispensing the pills aren’t fully qualified to do the job.
Pharmacists have qualifications in the profession and are licensed by the state board. But if you are purchasing pills from an unknown location, you have no way of knowing if your medicines are dispensed by someone who knows what they’re doing.
This could mean that the wrong strength pills are sent to you, which could seriously harm your health. When your meds are dispensed by someone who is unqualified, you can’t be sure of the medications you are receiving.
Organized Crime
When you purchase medication online, you could be helping fund organized crime. There are obviously serious risks for criminals to deal with illegal drugs, however, this isn’t the case with counterfeit or low-quality pills.
While they might not make the profits they would when selling narcotics, the risks are incredibly low when selling fake pills. The profits from this trade could be funding human trafficking and other crimes.
Fake Accreditation
The pharmacy you are looking to use might have some impressive looking regulatory seals on their homepage. This might convince you that the drugstore is a reliable place to purchase your meds. However, oftentimes scam pharmacies use fake accreditation to try and convince people to trust them.
A few regulatory seals on a pharmacy site can easily convince you that you are dealing with a trustworthy business. Often these accreditation seals are for organizations that don’t really exist, or they have fraudulently used regulatory approval that they have no right to use.
Most countries operate laws to regulate online pharmacies, so if the accreditation is fake, it means that the pharmacy is operating outside of the law. However, as an average customer, you can’t be expected to understand what regulatory approval a pharmacy should have, or recognize when the approval they are showing is fake.
How to Order Medicine Online Safely
If the risks of buying meds online seem too great, don’t worry there are things you can do to reduce the risk. With the best will in the world, you aren’t going to know what to look for to make sure you are buying from a reputable online pharmacy. While you can try to assess a pharmacy by yourself, it can be difficult to find out the details that reveal the truth if you don’t know what to look for.
Instead, a better option is to check out online pharmacy reviews 2021, where someone who knows what to look for has checked out the pharmacy you are about to give your financial details to. This will ensure that you remove the risks and don’t fall into a trap set up by scammers.
If you check an independent site offering online pharmacy reviews 2021, you won’t have to worry that you are taking the risks we have outlined.
Conclusion
Saving money on your meds is an important concern for many people, thanks to the ever-increasing prices from big pharma. Purchasing your pills online offers a great opportunity to cut the cost of the medicines you need, but there are potential problems that aren’t necessarily obvious.
Scam pharmacies operated by criminals, will do anything and make great claims about their store, to make sure you fill out your purchasing information. They know the things that will convince most buyers that the pharmacy is reliable and trustworthy, and they use this information to encourage people to make the mistake of completing a purchase.
You can save yourself a lot of money and still get safe and effective medicines by checking online pharmacy reviews 2021 before you complete the transaction.
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POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVES
There are also quite many online pharmacies on the net that have proved themselves to be excellent ones. We keep an eye on them as well. They get into our reviews from time to time, and you can see them on the pages of our site.We have placed the best online pharmacies into a separate list on the Pharmacy Ratings page. Ratings of online pharmacies that have successfully passed verification and check by our team: Link>>>
