AI-Powered Tools Transform Fight Against Counterfeit Drugs

In a video interview with Pharma Commerce, Mark Lee, MarqVision’s founder and CEO, highlights the rapid growth and increasing sophistication of the counterfeit pharmaceutical market, driven in large part by bad actors leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). Counterfeiters are now using AI to replicate authentic pharmaceutical packaging with high accuracy, build convincing fake websites, and manipulate search algorithms—including SEO—to lure vulnerable patients. Generative AI tools make it easier than ever to clone legitimate sites, trick search engines, and present fraudulent products as genuine.

Lee emphasizes that counterfeit pharmaceuticals pose a far greater threat than other counterfeit goods, such as luxury handbags, because fake drugs directly endanger patient health and bypass stringent safety regulations. Consuming these unregulated substances can lead to severe health consequences, making counterfeit medications both a public health crisis and a criminal enterprise.

According to Lee, these bad actors are evolving at an alarming pace—so quickly that even advanced anti-counterfeiting teams struggle to keep up. At MarqVision, the company reportedly employs top-tier engineers, including former Google software engineers, to develop AI tools capable of identifying and shutting down these threats. However, the speed and adaptability of counterfeiters make the challenge ongoing and complex.

Lee explains that it’s now possible to completely copy an official pharmaceutical company’s website, such as Pfizer.com, within seconds using code-replication tools. These fake sites often use slightly altered domain names—like “Pfizer.in” or “Pfizermedications.com”—and are nearly indistinguishable from the originals. As a result, the proliferation of such sites is growing, amplifying the risks to patients who may unknowingly purchase and consume counterfeit drugs.

Ultimately, Lee underscores that the combination of advanced AI tools and the high stakes of counterfeit pharmaceuticals is creating a rapidly evolving threat landscape—one that demands equally sophisticated and fast-moving countermeasures to protect consumers and maintain the integrity of the drug supply chain.

He also comments on the specific vulnerabilities in the global pharmaceutical supply chain that are most commonly exploited by counterfeiters; the key advantages of using AI-powered systems to detect and intercept counterfeit drugs compared to traditional anti-counterfeit methods;the role healthcare companies and regulators play in combating counterfeit medicines; and much more.

A transcript of his conversation with PC can be found below.

PC: What are the key advantages of using AI-powered systems to detect and intercept counterfeit drugs, compared to traditional anti-counterfeit methods?

Lee: I think it's about automation and scale, and I think arguably, you can solve this problem—or I don't know solving is the right word—but you can at least address these problems without AI. There are many traditional ways of doing things. There are best practices for tackling these counterfeit problems online. If you look at the traditional pharmaceutical brands, they all have a brand protection team, they all have a product authentication or product safety team, and they know how to handle this.

The issue is—especially with AI—the pace at which we see the growth of these counterfeits is really unprecedented, and if you just rely on traditional methods, you're going to fall behind. For example, one of the things that we do—and this is not just us, but any AI-technology company will use AI to scan thousands of online marketplaces on popular social media sites. For example, at MarqVision, we cover about 1,500 platforms. That includes e-commerce, social media, Twitter, all these sites in 118 countries, so that the omnipresence of these surveillance programs is unmatched compared to humans just checking everything one by one, and it can detect counterfeits and unauthorized sales in real-time.

Also, in order to take these things down, I think one thing is monitoring detection, but how do you take these down? You have to submit reports. In order to take down a fake website or a fake listing, you need to submit some kind of a claim to these platforms—Google, Alibaba, Amazon—and writing up that take-down report takes a lot of time. I think we did a survey experiment before where the best paralegal in the world, the best online brand protection manager, can maybe write about one take-down report per hour. That’s the max speed that you can go.

Just in comparison, last year, MarqVision took down 50 million online counterfeit listings. In order to do that manually, you would have needed 50 million man hours. That's kind of the scale that we operate in. The other thing is, with these pharma brands, one of the trends that you see is they sell a lot on social media, especially on Facebook and Instagram, and they don't really use the precise text. For example, if the medication is called Metformin, for example, you know, people actually don't use the word Metformin. They will use images of these Metformin, you know, packaging boxes, and they will just post that images on social media, again, like a photo on Instagram, or like a photo on Facebook, and the only way for you to find them is using image recognition technology.

You wouldn't be able to search it online, because if you can search it, counterfeiters can get caught easily, so they don't use these texts at all. Everything is kind of image-based. This is another thing that's going to be very difficult for humans to do, because there's really no easy way to look at millions of images at the same time and find the relevant products. That's an area where the AI technology can really excel compared to humans.