A study released by online brand management  firm MarkMonitor has found that visits to fake drug websites has increased three-fold over the past year.

From Forbes:

MarkMonitor’s study analyzed 2,986 sites hawking major pharmaceutical brands pulled from its pool of spam e-mails. That’s slightly less than the 3,160 sites tracked in a similar study by MarkMonitor last year.  But even within that slightly smaller group, business seems to be booming.

Using the traffic tool Alexa as a rough estimator, MarkMonitor found that pharmacies included in Alexa’s top 100,000 sites–about a third of the pharmacy sites the researchers traced–now each receive about 99,000 visitors daily, more than triple the 32,000 daily visitors per ranked site last year.

To be sure, that 99,000 figure isn’t likely to be exact: Alexa’s people-counter tracks only a small subset of users meant to represent the Web audience as a whole. But the fact that the same cross section of users now visit online pharmacies at three times last year’s rate points to an explosion in the Web’s drug trade, MarkMonitor’s researchers say.

Of those increasingly trafficked sites, not many were likely to be selling legitimate products. Only two of the 3,000 or so pharmacies studied were certified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy as “trusted” sites. Most advertise their wares at discounts of around 85% compared to standard drug prices, a strong sign of counterfeiting

Counterfeit Pharmaceutical Drugs is a $40 Billion business.