As many of you know we have the website online to make ordering much easier. Obviously the nature of our business makes it hard to do this on a long term basis as it’s a cat and mouse game to a certain extent. Last week we had our domain “challenged” by the hosting company. This is a weird situation for the hosting company and for us; I will try and explain a little more for anyone that cares to understand.
For the last 5 years or so, we, and many other sources that have a website, have had issues with keeping the site online, as the domains are being challenged by a 3rd party company called LegitScript. LegitScript started up a while back to combat all of the counterfeit selling of prescription/controlled drugs online… if you think of all the cheap Viagra and Cialis, and a host of other semi-regulated drugs, being sold from other countries, you can get an idea of what they are going after. Basically, the larger pharmaceutical companies, who are losing money to the knock off drugs being sold online, are the customers of LegitScript. These big pharma companies pay LegitScript to use bots and other online tools to track down anyone selling anything that competes with these large pharma companies. Normally this is not an issue, as the other rouge pharmacies are on servers in countries that no one can touch them, but the domain registrars (the companies that you buy your domain name from; think GoDaddy in the US) are where they have leverage. They contact the domain registrar telling them that they have sold a domain to someone who is selling something illegal, and then force the domain registrar to contact the owner of the domain to prove they are not counterfeiting or selling things illegally. Obviously that’s hard to prove, so they end up taking the domain, forcing us to jump to another domain registrar with a new domain.
It is a frustrating ordeal, as law enforcement is in no way involved in this; rather, it is just a private business doing the dirty work of big pharma. Our site generally stays under the radar, but it seems every year or two we get targeted and have to change domains. This is what happened to us last week, so we had to change over to the store.depotorder.to domain. Although the site is on the new domain, all of the customer information (username, password, etc) remains the same, you just have to find the site at store.depotorder.to now.
Anyhow, I wanted to share that with you guys so you have a bit of a better understanding of what’s going on here. If you have any questions about this or want to know more, please reach out and let us know, we’re here every day and always ready to help.
G & all of Team GearDepot