We’ve all seen plenty of ads for dodgy tablets and male enhancement drugs in our email inboxes, and it’s no surprise to note that there’s a huge number of them floating around the “sponsored results” sections of major search engines.

Take Bing.com, Microsoft’s shiny new search engine, which has been called out by an online pharmacy verification service for displaying a huge number of ads from illegal online companies.

A report from LegitScript.com suggests that nearly nine in every ten “sponsored results” displayed on Bing were for fake or illegal companies, with the authors claiming to be able to order prescription-only muscle relaxant from one of the advertisers without any checks being done.

KnujkOn, which tracks Internet criminality, collaborated on the report. President Garth Bruen said, “These types of sites are usually the product of organized crime and vast illicit drug networks, many of them based in Russia and Eastern Europe, that deceive, defraud and poison Internet users.”

Not surprisingly the call to Microsoft is to fix the problem, though that may be easier said than done.

Originally posted on August 5, 2009 @ 8:11 am