ALPhA

Allowing the mail-order sale of medications, including prescription drugs, saves consumers time and money. On the other hand, this carries a high risk of abuse: in particular, online pharmacies are being used as a distribution channel for illegal medications. According to the WHO (World Health Organization), one in two online pharmacies that do not disclose their corporate headquarters has counterfeit medicines in its product range. This illegal trade endangers public health and results in significant losses for the pharmaceutical industry. Law enforcement agencies face major challenges in this regard: The offenses have cross-border implications and are in some cases attributable to organized crime; furthermore, the legal situation within the European Union is complex and not harmonized.

The ALPhA project – Impact of the liberalisation of online trade in Europe on the phenomenon of pharmaceutical crime – examines the illegal dispatch of medicines and the resulting challenges for law enforcement agencies. The aim of ALPhA is to develop specific recommendations for action to improve the prosecution of this type of crime.

The ALPhA project team adopts an interdisciplinary, comprehensive approach and comprises social scientists, legal scholars and IT forensics experts. As part of the project, the IT forensics team at Fraunhofer SIT has developed a so-called focused text crawler. This is designed to help automatically detect illegal online shops.

In addition, the experts at Fraunhofer SIT are responsible for setting up a database designed to assist legal professionals and investigators. This database contains case studies of illegal online shops; however, its main purpose is to map out the legal situation regarding online retail in the 28 different EU countries. With the help of the database, investigators can first determine whether a shop is to be classified as legal or illegal, and find out what the relevant legislation is in the respective EU country, what penalties apply, and so on.