Viagra gang who netted £10 million are given massive prison sentences

A counter drug gang consisting of twelve people managed to rake in a staggering fortune in excess of £10 million, a court heard earlier this week.

Under the guise of a nationwide mail-order fishing tackle company, the gang – which comprised of six people alone from northern Lincolnshire – flogged suspiciously low priced male impotence pills, apparently offering them either over the internet or selling them in person.

The phony pills could have resulted in “catastrophic damage” to the public due to the fact that fake Viagra tablets have previously been found to contain a variety of toxic substances such as acid, brick dust and road paint, Judge Charles Wide QC told the Old Bailey as he sentenced the gang.

A former married couple seemed to be the pioneers behind the operation, with a northern branch ran by the Thailand-based husband and his wife in control of the daily UK operation. Members of their family were also hired to successfully continue the illicit dealings.

A number of ‘front’ companies were formed that claimed to be selling items such as jewellery, fishing tackle and cosmetics in order to take-in electronic transactions, and the crooks then laundered the money through over 100 different bank accounts. In total, the exact amount of laundered money or that obtained by fraudulent means was undetermined, but estimates pit the proceeds at more than a staggering £10 million – raking in as much as £60,000 each week.

Prosecutor Gillian Jones told the Old Bailey: “This case is not about wanting to distribute good medicines cheaply, but rather the motivation was greed, with an utter disregard for patient safety.”
The court was told that the illegal dealings spanned for eight years from 2004, with those behind the scam carrying on even after being arrested on September 20, 2011. The arrests came after an investigation by the drugs regulatory body, MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory).
“The medicines that were seized which were purported to be Viagra and Valium, in fact, turned out to be counterfeit,” said Miss Jones.

“This was big business. The proceeds of the supply of these medicines, via websites which have been traced to various merchant facilities, is in excess of £10 million – that is not the real figure. Not all bank accounts have been identified.”

The money was transferred into bank accounts ran by those either directly involved in the conspiracy or members of their family, and was then either withdrawn in cash or put back into the business to keep it running.

Miss Jones continued: “They purported to be trading fishing tackle, cosmetics or jewellery, but they were just a front to hide the real merchandise which was unlicensed medicines. As demand grew, the customer database widened to countries including Sweden, France and Germany.”

After the banks began raising questions about transactions going through the accounts, the gang then craftily opened accounts offshore in Belize and Panama.

Last Monday, the crooks paid the penalty however for tricking the public by selling the dangerous fake erectile dysfunction drugs, and drugs for other apparent purposes.

A 42-year-old man from Brighton was given a massive 17-year prison sentence for being the main man in the scam and found guilty of offshore money laundering. The judge also jailed a 45-year-old man from Crayford, Kent, to four years, describing him as the middle man of the operation. He was found guilty of money laundering, conspiracy and selling or distributing counterfeit goods. Other members of the gang were also slapped with sentences totalling several years between them, proving that crime doesn’t pay and will catch up with everybody eventually.

UK Malaria risk closer could be much higher in future years

Health experts are fearing that increasing temperatures and climate change in the UK could bring an influx of deadly tropical diseases to these shores in the next few decades.

Mosquito-borne diseases such as Malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus and chikungunya are primarily associated with being prevalent across Africa and Southern America, but could reach Britain in years to come, according to experts writing in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal by Dr Jolyon Medlock and Professor Steve Leach, of the emergency response department at Public Health England.

Confirmed cases of dengue fever, West Nile virus and chikungunya have already been seen in certain parts of Europe and Greece in particularly has witnessed high numbers of malaria cases as mosquitoes shift into new territories.

Conditions are thought to be warm enough for the Asian tiger mosquito to survive in Britain and this type of blood-sucking insect has already nestled in 25 different European countries, bringing with it dengue fever to Croatia and France, with chikungunya being spread to both Italy and France.

In France alone, there have been 200 cases of chikungunya, and by 2041 in London, conditions could allow for transmission by mosquitoes for one month a year in London by 2041 and for three months in the South-east by 2071 because of predicted temperature rises.

However, in the UK, climate change models are predicting higher temperatures and increased rainfall in the next few decades – offering mosquitoes “ideal conditions” to survive and spread their deadly diseases.

Remarkably, the UK is already thought to be home to up to 34 species of mosquito, with many f of these able to transmit malaria.

There is one climate model that shows that by the year 2030, southern England may generally increase in temperature enough for malaria to be transmitted for up to a third of the year. A different climate model even shows there could be conditions that suffice for malaria to be able to be transmitted for around two months of the year as far up the UK as southern Scotland.

“There is little doubt that climate change will affect vector-borne disease risk,” the authors warn in their paper.

They further state that despite climate change being a clear key issue in the transmission of diseases like dengue fever and malaria, other factors need to be taken into account, such as the availability of water for the mosquitoes to lay their eggs.

If you are travelling abroad and require malaria medication for prevention and treatment, Doxycycline, Malarone, Paludrine, and Jungle Formula Maximum Pump Spray are options worth considering.  In addition, don’t forget to check the NHS Fit For Travel website where you will find the recommended malaria medication for your destination.

Medical Specialists® Pharmacy launch Mobile Website after huge Patient Demand

Medical Specialists® Pharmacy are delighted to announce they have now gone mobile! The new mobile website has been created due to the ever-changing requirements of their patients, with increasingly hectic lifestyles now meaning a lot of us are using our mobile phones or tablets to access the internet whilst on the go.

The streamlined mobile site will offer a much faster, efficient and overall better browsing experience for all new and existing patients, with optimal download speed and a site that has been designed specifically for the differing screen shapes and sizes of mobile devices.

Introducing the mobile version of the Medical Specialists® website will be fantastic news to those always on the move throughout the day, with little time to sit down at a computer, or even those that don’t own a computer. The pharmacy receives countless phone calls from patients each and every day looking to place a telephone order with them purely because they are struggling to order from their tablet or phone, so the Medical Specialists® IT department realised a mobile-friendly website was absolutely vital to cater for the needs of the massive patient base that come to them.

Those patients that are returning to Medical Specialists® will now be able to log-in to their user area within seconds of accessing the mobile site, with a more concise, rapid and mobile-friendly browsing experience when searching for treatments of conditions like erectile dysfunction, male pattern baldness, alcohol dependence and much more.

After all, nobody wants to spend time on their mobile phone or tablet attempting to frantically scroll through a condensed desktop website that is simply too difficult to read and too time consuming when trying to perform the most basic of tasks on it.

Most of us will have been there before…somebody sends us a link to a website either by text message or email, and clicking on the link merely brings up an unviewable, scrambled, chaotic mess. Annoyingly, the screen size will probably have to be resized upon each click of that website’s subpages – zooming in and out – with agonisingly slow loading times from all the text and images the mobile device will have to load from the desktop site.

Moreover, imagine as a business having a collection of your website links all squashed together just because the page isn’t configured for a mobile device, coupled with the fact we have to use our fingers which aren’t as accurate as the click of a computer mouse…potential customers may find themselves consistently pressing the wrong link and quickly ending up very frustrated!

If the user can’t easily browse and read the content on a specific website from their mobile device, they will leave frustrated, uninspired, and that particular business has just lost out on a potential sale and long-term customer.

Anyone already familiar with Medical Specialists® will perhaps not be surprised at the introduction of the new mobile site. For over 20 years they have been at the forefront of using the internet as an efficient way of reaching out to patients, mainly with the changing demands of today’s world. Back in 1994 Medical Specialists® was heavily involved in computerisation of their patients and medication, and then by 2001 became the first legal online clinic in the UK supplying a range of medication via online consultation, by their in-house Doctor.

Then from 2012, the pharmacy could dispense NHS prescriptions either by patients sending their paper prescriptions or if the patient’s GP sends the prescription to the pharmacy via the Electronic Prescription Service. As previously reported on the Chamber of Commerce, in 2014 Medical Specialists® also started to offer certain over-the-counter products on e-commerce giant Amazon, and has seen this side of the business boom in the subsequent months. Therefore, the need for a mobile site was imperative and may lead to even further growth for Medical Specialists® in the very near future!