Protect Yourself From Pharmacy Scams

If you buy medicine online, someone will eventually try to defraud you — by imitating a pharmacy you use, by selling you something that is not what the label says, or by getting your card details under the cover of an order you really did place. This page is about recognising that before it costs you anything.

Some of it is about us specifically: what we will and will not ever send you, so a fake is easy to spot. The rest applies to any pharmacy website, including the ones we compete with.

One Rule That Catches Almost Everything

We never ask for a card number, and we never will.

Not by email, not by text, not on the phone, and not on this website — our checkout has no card form on it at all. Payment is arranged after the order is placed, through a payment link you follow yourself or a bank transfer you initiate yourself. At no point does anyone here type your card number into anything, because at no point do we have it.

That gives you a bright line that needs no judgement. Any message claiming to be from ReliableKart that asks you to reply with card details, read them out, or enter them into a form we sent you is fraudulent. It does not matter how convincing the logo is or how accurately it quotes your order. Stop there.

What We Will and Will Not Do

On the last row: we do not stock controlled substances at all, which is set out with the full list we checked on the controlled medications page. An email in our name offering them is not us.

Check the Domain, Not the Padlock

The most common way people end up on a fake pharmacy is a lookalike domain reached from a link, and the padlock icon does nothing to protect you from it.

A padlock means the connection is encrypted and you have reached the domain shown in the address bar. It is not a verdict on the business behind the site. The certificates that produce it are free and automated, take minutes to obtain, and fraudulent sites have them too. We explain this at length on our SSL page, because a padlock doing persuasive work it was never designed for is exactly how this trick functions.

So read the domain instead. It should be reliablekart.com, spelled exactly. Things that are not us, and are the usual patterns:

• A different ending — .co, .net, .shop, .store in place of .com
• An inserted word or hyphen — reliable-kart, reliablekart-store, myreliablekart
• A swapped or doubled character — reliabIekart with a capital i, reliablekartt, reliablekrat
• Our name buried inside a longer domain — reliablekart.something-else.com. Only the part immediately before the final .com identifies the site

The practical defence is boring and effective: bookmark the real site and reach it from the bookmark rather than from search results, emails or adverts.

Judging Any Pharmacy Website

These are the signals worth weighing on any site, ours included. Apply them here and hold us to them.

Warning signs. Controlled substances offered without a prescription — the clearest single indicator there is. Prices far below every other source. No named manufacturer on the product pages. No physical address or working contact route. Pressure tactics and countdown timers. Unsolicited email offering prescription medicine. A demand for payment by a method with no recourse.

Reassuring signs. The manufacturer named on every product. Plain statements about what is not approved or guaranteed. Delivery estimates that sound slow rather than magical. Policies that set out what happens when things go wrong, with actual timeframes. A support route that reaches a person.

The second list is the more useful one. Fraudulent sites are built to look good; what they find hard to fake is specificity, and hardest of all is publishing their own limits. A page that tells you what it cannot do is a page written by people expecting to still be here next year.

Counterfeit Medicine, Which Is the Real Risk

Losing money to a fake website is recoverable. Swallowing what it sent you is not, and that is the risk this page is really about.

The category matters here. Men’s health treatments attract counterfeiting more than almost anything else in a pharmacy, for a reason that has nothing to do with chemistry: buyers are motivated and reluctant to ask questions, which is precisely the customer a counterfeiter wants. Products marketed as “herbal” or “natural” alternatives are a particular trap, because a substantial number of them have been found to contain undeclared prescription drugs — the opposite of what the label promises, and dangerous specifically for the people most likely to choose them.

Our product authenticity page explains that risk properly and gives you a checklist for the moment a parcel arrives. If you read one other page on this site, read that one.

Our Position on Email

We do not send unsolicited bulk marketing email. Messages we send relate to an order you placed, or to something you asked to receive, and anything you opted into carries a working unsubscribe link.

We do not sell or rent contact details. If you are receiving marketing for prescription medicine that you never asked for, it did not come from us — and whoever sent it is already ignoring the rules that govern commercial email, which is a reasonable indication of how seriously they take the rest. Our antispam policy covers this in full.

If You Think You Have Been Targeted

Do not reply to the message, follow its links, or open attachments. Then:

• Keep it. The sending address, the full headers where you can get them, and the link it points at are the useful parts.
• Tell us through the contact page if it used our name. We would rather know, and we can warn others.
• If you entered card details, contact your bank or card issuer immediately and ask them to block the card. Do that before anything else on this list.
• If you entered a password you use elsewhere, change it everywhere you used it.
• Report it. In the United States, to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, and to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. Both take reports from consumers directly.

There is no embarrassment in any of this. These operations are competent and well resourced, and the people who fall for them are not careless — they are busy, and the message arrived at a plausible moment.

Common Questions