MUMBAI, India, Jan. 9 -- Intellectual Property India has published a patent application (202541114072 A) filed by K. S. P. Madhan; T. N. Srikanth; G. Bharath; S. Gokul Sriram; and S. R. Sidharth, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, on Nov. 20, 2025, for 'pharmacy fraud detection using web scraping with street view.'
Inventor(s) include K. S. P. Madhan; T. N. Srikanth; G. Bharath; S. Gokul Sriram; and S. R. Sidharth.
The application for the patent was published on Jan. 9, under issue no. 02/2026.
According to the abstract released by the Intellectual Property India: "The proliferation of illicit online pharmacies and sophisticated fraudulent billing practices poses a significant threat to public health and results in substantial financial losses. This paper presents a comprehensive, multi-modal system for pharmacy fraud detection, utilizing a Django-based web application to integrate a web scraping engine with a geospatial verification module. The scraping engine, built with DuckDuckGo for link discovery and BeautifulSoup for data extraction, is employed to find and parse a pharmacy's digital footprint, extracting key public data such as PBM affiliations and listed addresses. Upon submission of a query, the system triggers a verification protocol. This process first involves an automated web data extraction to identify and report any discrepancies between the user- provided data and the pharmacy's public information. Secondly, it presents a Street-level view of the provided address, allowing for a critical human-in-the-Ioop verification of the physical location's legitimacy. The proposed system's efficacy is evaluated using a curated dataset of legitimate and known fraudulent pharmacy entities, demonstrating high accuracy in identifying suspicious operations. This integration of automated web scraping with human-centric geospatial verification aims to significantly reduce manual auditing times and enhance the ability of regulators and PBMs to identify fraud reasing fi."
Disclaimer: Curated by HT Syndication.
