Sky-high demand and costly price tags for wildly popular injectable diet drugs are now fueling the sale of counterfeit versions.
Since January, the FDA has confiscated thousands of counterfeit diet drugs, issuing warnings about the potentially dangerous medications they say threaten the safety of public health.
The FDA warns some of these fake drugs have even fooled pharmacists and managed to slip into the U.S. supply chain, causing hospitalizations and death.
Injectable weight-loss drugs have quickly become one of America’s most popular solutions to losing unwanted extra pounds.
Transformational stories on social media sites have fueled a craze around brand-name diet drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. It has led to chronic global shortages and a booming counterfeit market targeting desperate buyers who will go to extreme measures to find the drugs.
Eric Feinberg tracks illegal drug sales on social media sites for the Coalition for a Safer Web. Most of the work he does online is undercover.
“I saw one of the pages I was following selling illegal hard drugs. They were also offering a weight-loss product. That's how I kind of went in and said, 'Okay, let me let me go down this rabbit hole,'” said Feinberg.
And Feinberg went way down it. He connected online with sellers to set up illegal buys. He documented his communications and included them in a joint report given to Congress. His goal is to urge lawmakers to pass more regulations of prescription drug sales online.
“They’re offering Ozempic and just say no prescriptions needed,” said Feinberg.
Feinberg warns consumers that any brand-name weight-loss drug advertised as not requiring a doctor’s prescription should raise serious concerns.
But even more concerning to Feinberg is the way that bogus retailers can easily target buyers. Just a simple search of key words such as “discount diet drugs” or “cheap Ozempic” on a social media site will result in a flood of questionable offers.
“You get inundated with it; the algorithm picks it up. And literally when you go into a login screen, first landing page, you're going to see that as some of your immediate posts,” says Feinberg, “It takes the seller and the buyer and hooks it up so that’s the whole thing.”
Buyers can find themselves connected to online sellers like Isis Navarro Reyes, who was arrested in May by an undercover FDA agent after investigators claim she was illegally selling fake Ozempic on TikTok from her home in Long Island, New York.
The agency released several images of counterfeit Ozempic injections that show how hard it can be to detect a fake. In a side-by-side comparison they can look almost identical, but small differences are a giveaway.
Few people in the country track these convincing counterfeits more closely than Al Carter. He’s the executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, or NABP.
When asked to describe the current landscape of counterfeit diet drugs, Carter said, “I would say it’s really scary, it really is. I’ve seen this for the last six or seven months and it has been constant.”
That explains how counterfeit products have ended up in big chain pharmacies across the country.
“These counterfeiters are getting really good because as you look at the technology and advancements that technology has made, I mean, some of these products end up in local pharmacies, and the pharmacies don't know the difference,” said Carter.
The FDA announced this past December that thousands of units of counterfeit Ozempic had started to show up in the legitimate U.S. drug supply chain and advised patients to check the products they had received.
Our investigation discovered that 11 shipments of counterfeit Ozempic were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents this past spring at an airport hub in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The bogus medication had come from Colombia, South America and was headed to several states including New York and Texas.
That was just one of 40 seizures the agency has made since the start of the year, intercepting more than 1,700 vials of fake Ozempic ordered by unsuspecting buyers in the U.S.
“You have this drug that is thousands of dollars for a month supply, and if I can say I'm going to get it for you for $150, there are many people out there that are going to take that risk,” said Carter.
The data shows the risks are real. Scripps News analyzed all adverse events reported to the FDA involving Ozempic and similar drugs since 2022 and found 93 reports of counterfeit or suspected counterfeits. Of those cases, 56 of them involved serious outcomes including 21 hospitalizations and at least one death.
Obesity medicine specialist Dr. Veronica Johnson works at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago and has seen several patients who have bought weight-loss medication online and later had issues with it not being effective. Others have had more dangerous outcomes.
“So, there was one patient who thought they were getting Ozempic and it was actually insulin and so as a result his blood sugar went down. He went into a coma and had a seizure,” said Johnson, “You know, we don't know what's in these things.”
Eric Feinberg continues to hunt for counterfeit retailers online. He claims as one seller is shut down, another emerges to fill the space. He wants Congress to act swiftly to regulate the problem.
“You don’t really know what the product is, and then you're going to inject it in the body. ... It's like Russian roulette,” said Feinberg.
