You want to lose weight — but you could lose money or end up in the hospital with one of these risky Ozempic scams.
New research warns of illegal online pharmacies peddling faux or substandard Ozempic, or in some cases, taking money for nothing in return.
“It’s hard to say how widespread these scams are,” Tim Mackey, a professor in the Global Health Program at the University of California, San Diego, told The Post in an email. “It changes based on availability of raw materials, and there are different levels of counterfeiters (some that produce product with no active ingredient, wrong ingredient, some ingredient, and online scams that don’t deliver anything).”
Last summer, Mackey and his colleagues searched for websites advertising semaglutide without a prescription. Semaglutide is the active ingredient in the diabetes drug Ozempic and the weight loss drug Wegovy. Both require prescriptions.
The team purchased six products for quality control testing but only received three.
“Three vendors selling Ozempic injections engaged in nondelivery scams requesting extra payments (range, US $650-$1200) to purportedly clear customs, confirmed as fraudulent by customs agencies,” the researchers wrote in their findings, published Friday in JAMA Network Open.
The study authors reported that semaglutide was present in the three samples sent to them but the purity varied (7% to 14% versus the advertised 99%) and the amount of semaglutide exceeded what was on the label by 29% to 39%.
Semaglutide overdoses have become commonplace. US poison centers fielded nearly 3,000 semaglutide calls from January to November 2023 — 15 times the amount in 2019.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an alert last week about semaglutide overdoses.
Most reports stemmed from patients drawing up more than the prescribed dose — sometimes five to 20 times more — from a multi-dose vial for injection.
Some of the patients had to be hospitalized, with symptoms ranging from nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain to fainting, headache, migraine, dehydration, to acute pancreatitis and gallstones.
Illnesses will likely become more widespread as the counterfeit market expands along with Ozempic’s growing popularity.
Mackey pointed out there are about 30,000 to 40,000 active illegal online pharmacies, which could get in on the action. People who try to buy unauthorized Ozempic online risk getting a product without semaglutide, the wrong amount of semaglutide, a dangerous ingredient instead, a contaminated product or no product at all.
“Consumers really need to partner with their health care provider to ensure that semaglutide is even appropriate for them in the first place, and then only source it from a legitimate licensed pharmacy in order to ensure their treatment is not compromised,” Mackey told The Post.
