People clicking through spam emails offering prescription drugs at crazy prices don’t usually think twice before clicking “delete.” But a U of T researcher has found that, a surprising amount of the time, these offers actually work.

Dr. Alejandro R. Jadad, professor of medicine and information studies at U of T, began researching the spam mail hawking human health products to online buyers last year with his former student, Peter Gernburd.

“The internet is really being crippled by spam. We discovered that 82 per cent of e-mails circulating through the world are spam,” said Jadad.

Dr. Jadad bravely clicked through—and documented—the segment of that 82 per cent made up of offers for prescription drugs such as Viagra, Valium, and penis-enlargement pills.

“I wanted to figure out how to handle spam myself, and I was shocked to realize that there was nothing published on the behaviour of spammers. So I said that if there’s nothing on that, I’m not going to wait for that to happen because spam has been around for 20 years or so, and it’s getting worse,” he said

Jadad and Gernburd then began their study by creating three unfiltered e-mail accounts to see how many spam messages they would receive in the month of November 2006.

“We collected over 4,000 e-mail messages from those three accounts from spam, and by spam we mean unsolicited, commercial offers,” said Dr. Jadad.

They found that one third of the spam was health-related.

Over a week-long period, they responded to every such ad that gave identifiable information about the seller.

Their spam contained 27 unique offers. Using a credit card and a post office box, they bought one product from each of these alleged internet hucksters.

One third of the products ordered resulted in deliveries to Jadad and Gernburd, who received five prescription drugs and four natural health products. Furthermore, the credit card was only billed for items Jadad actually received.

Jadad added that he does not know if the drugs he got online are authentic, warning that they could be useless or contain dangerous substances.

“The first thing we want to show is the magnitude of the issue,” said Jadad.

“People are putting themselves at risk. One out of four messages on the internet is health-related spam and if you order drugs, you get them one out three times. These [spammers] are gone in two weeks and can’t be held accountable if something goes wrong. It’s very important for people to know so that they can make an informed decision.”

With the first stage of their study complete, JAadad and Gernburd are currently working on determining the legitimacy of the drugs they received and looking at what agencies such as Health Canada, INTERPOL, and the RCMP are doing, or can do, to help the general public against potential, poorly understood dangers of spam.