Last week, we released a report with Internet compliance guru KnujOn.com about rogue Internet pharmacies in bing.com’s ad space. In the original report, we ordered a prescription drug from a Microsoft-sponsored advertisement that tested positive as counterfeit, and ordered prescription drugs without a prescription from other bing.com advertisements. The company subsequently announced that it had manually reviewed all pharma-related keywords to sweep out advertisers in violation of their policies, and that it believed the violation percentage to be substantially smaller than the report indicated.

Unfortunately, the problem hasn’t yet been fixed. Today, we are releasing a short follow-up report indicating that we got addictive drugs again, without a valid prescription, from a bing.com, just days after Microsoft says that it manually reviewed all of its Internet pharmacy ads. KnujOn simply logged on, went to bing.com, and ordered an addictive prescription drug within a matter of minutes…again, from a bing.com ad (not an organic search result). The KnujOn researcher never saw a doctor or had a medical condition.

But wait…was this a new advertiser that somehow slipped through bing.com’s filters that we happened to observe right before it got caught? Was it a hijacked landing page? No. This is not a game of “gotcha.” This website has been a bing.com advertiser for months. In fact, we specifically notified Microsoft about this advertiser in February 2009, six months before KnujOn made the purchase. We never received a response, and the advertiser continued to display bing.com ads unabated, despite our notification. Somehow it survived bing.com’s manual review, which naturally leads to the question of whether Microsoft thought this was a legitimate Internet pharmacy, and if so, why.

The drug in question is Soma (carisoprodol), an addictive muscle relaxant that is a controlled substance in some states and requires a valid prescription and medical supervision everywhere. The drug is sometimes abused in combination with drugs like hydrocodone (Vicodin) and has been responsible for overdoses, even fatal ones. To get this drug, all you have to do is fill out an online form with the website in question. In addition to the obvious legal and safety implications, it violates Microsoft’s stated policies.

As Garth Bruen, KnujOn President said, “This isn’t about an occasional abusive advertiser that slips through Microsoft’s filters. This is about a system that isn’t working.”