Catching the fake Viagra dealers.

Halai Ashish’s pharmaceutical business had been on for a number of years. The legitimate business, which Ashish ran with his pharmacist wife, Nanya Halai, enjoyed a tremendous amount of goodwill.

After sometime, Ashish and his wife decided to sell their business so that he could try his hand at selling herbal weight-loss aids, while still using their business name. Not satisfied with what they were earning from the weight-loss aids, the British couple had decided to venture into selling fake Viagra tablets – the magic pills that were generally seen as the ultimate refuge for millions of men who are suffering from erectile dysfunction.

Clinching a deal to supply a Mexican company based in the Bahamas the drugs, Ashish established a network of contacts which he effectively deployed to smuggle the fake Viagra tablets through Great Britain into the Bahamas.

Devising a foolproof method of concealing his drugs, Ashish would mark the packages as vitamin supplements for dogs and ship them through such reputable companies as DHL.

Finally found out when the fake Viagra tablets, together with a number of other counterfeit drugs, were detected and seized while being smuggled into the Stansted and Heathrow airports, the Ashish case spanned two years, between 2003 and 2004.

Tests conducted on the seized samples showed that up to 90 percent of the active ingredients of the drugs were genuine, while most of the fake drugs were sold on the internet.

On further investigations, Ashish and his group were discovered to be a UK part of a global distribution network of drug counterfeiting ring that have tentacles extending into such countries like Pakistan, India and China, the US and also the Caribbean.

The Ashish drug scandal, generally known as the biggest drug bust in the history of the UK, is a factual representation of the growing incidents of the sale of fake Viagra tablets on the internet.

According to an internet survey, there are over 500 pharmaceutical companies selling Viagra tablets online, and a chunk of these online sellers are fake dealers.

The fact that the Ashish gang, despite not being genuine dealers, went as far as prescribing the Viagra tablets to their prospective buyers, shows how far some of the fake dealers could go to deceive the public.

The Chinese police in the eastern province of Zhejiang continues the litany of fake Viagra dealers story when they raided a 30-man gang suspected of selling and manufacturing fake Viagra tablets.

About 18,000 fake Viagra tablets were seized together with over a ton of fake drugs during the raid, and the gang sold all the drugs in over 12 countries.

Also, in Guangdong, 12 people were arrested in possession of one ton of fake drugs and large volumes of raw materials for producing cheap sildenafil citrate, the generic name for Viagra tablets.

On the 18th of December at the Paris main air hub at Roissy, a freight cargo bound for Brazil was intercepted by the French custom. The cargo contained boxes branded Erectalis and Powergra, and each box contained four tablets cloned in the characteristic shape and colour of Cialis and Viagra pills.

The drugs were found to be fake when they were closely inspected by representatives from Pfizer and Eli Lilly, the makers of Viagra and Cialis respectively.

The head of Enforcement at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, opined that the greatest problem to the proliferation of the internet drug fraud was the attitude of the public in continually overlooking the reputable pharmaceutical companies as a means of getting their dose of real Viagra tablets, choosing instead to buy cheap Viagra online.