Surge in fake Ozempic reveals dark side of weight-loss frenzy
Fake Ozempic products that include bar-codes and packaging that appear similar in colour, size and shape. Photo: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg
When Andy Morling heard about a revolutionary new weight-loss cure last spring, he figured it might spark a shadier market for fakes.
His hunch was right. Almost a year later, the UK law-enforcement veteran is leading the charge against criminals looking to profit from the very human desire to slim down.
Both organized crime and unscrupulous lone entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on the weight-loss frenzy with concoctions that range from useless to potentially deadly. Their packaging mimics Novo Nordisk A/S’s Ozempic and Wegovy, the sister drugs that made the company the most valuable in Europe last year.
“This is a brand new criminal threat for us,” Morling said, speaking from an office outside London that sits adjacent to a secure warehouse filled with thousands of seized medicines, including large sacks of fake Ozempic. “It was born essentially last spring.”
That’s when the Novo medicines became a social media phenomenon, fueled by Hollywood celebrity endorsements, even as supply shortages kept them out of reach for many, especially outside the US. Wegovy, the weight-loss successor to the diabetes drug Ozempic, was first introduced in the UK last September, but its maker restricts how much can be shipped.
When there aren’t enough legitimate products to meet demand, Morling said “criminals are very quick to find a way into it”. Morling doesn’t work for the police. He heads the criminal enforcement team at the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, or MHRA — a government agency better known for reviewing medicines than catching criminals.
Yet his team tracks down illegal websites and monitors social media to stamp out sales of fake “skinny jabs.” They even carry out raids. Their hands-on approach stands out in Europe, where some other agencies don’t actively seek out bogus treatments.
The UK medicines agency has seized 869 fake Ozempic pens so far — more than its counterparts in Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland and the Netherlands combined. The pens found in Britain include crude fakes as well as ones distributed in bulk by more sophisticated criminals.
Some contained insulin — a potentially lethal filling — rather than semaglutide, the active ingredient in both Ozempic and Wegovy. While vital to people with diabetes, insulin can cause seizures and even death for the average person.
Patients have been hospitalized after taking suspected falsified Ozempic beyond the UK, with reports from Austria, Lebanon and the US. The US Food and Drug Administration says it’s aware of five adverse events linked to the counterfeit drugs.
“It only takes one or two rogue pharmacies to have a negative impact,” said Bernard Naughton, assistant professor of pharmacy at Trinity College Dublin.
Wegovy and Ozempic have ignited something of a gold rush in the pharma industry, with drugmakers vying to capture a piece of the $100bn market opportunity. While Novo was first, Eli Lilly & Co. has since introduced a similar injection and others are snapping at the drugmakers’ heels.
Morling’s team initially started to hear from colleagues at the UK border about Ozempic pens being seized, he said. The products were fake — crudely disguised insulin pens with the label peeled off and replaced with an Ozempic sticker.
But the trade grew in sophistication, culminating in the seizure of 500 counterfeit pens at two UK wholesalers. To the uninitiated, some of them could be confused for the real deal, according to Morling. The fakes at the regulator’s warehouse include bar-codes and packaging that appear similar in color, size and shape to legitimate pens.
To date, the UK border force has seized 369 fake Ozempic pens on the medicines agency’s behalf. The bigger tranche of counterfeits — 500 in total — were found “knocking on the door of the regulated supply chain,” Morling said.
The products showing up in legal channels “concerns me greatly” because of the health risk, said Morling, who spent 37 years leading intelligence at government agencies, including the Serious Fraud Office and the National Crime Agency.
Falsified drugs are big business for criminals globally, with pharmaceutical crime spiking by 50% between 2018 and 2022 and impacting the majority of countries, according to data from the Pharmaceutical Security Institute.
The World Health Organization has estimated that one in 10 medical products in low- and middle-income countries is substandard or falsified. With the advent of online pharmacies, it’s becoming harder for customers to distinguish between real medicines and imitations.
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