Dangerous Ozempic scams can cost you money, good health

You want to lose weight – but you could lose money or end up in the hospital with one of these dangerous Ozempic scams.

New research warns of illegal online pharmacies selling counterfeit or substandard Ozempic, or in some cases, getting 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 varies based on the availability of raw materials and there are varying levels of counterfeiters (some producing product with no active ingredient, wrong ingredients, some ingredients and online scams that give nothing).

Last summer, Mackey and his colleagues looked for websites that advertised over-the-counter semaglutide. 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 received only three.

“Three vendors selling Ozempic injections engaged in non-delivery fraud by demanding additional payments (range US$650-1,200) for allegedly clearing 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 common. US poison centers made 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 of the reports came from patients taking more than the prescribed dose — sometimes five to 20 times more — from a multi-dose vial.

Some of the patients had to be hospitalized, with symptoms ranging from nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain to fainting, headaches, migraines, dehydration, acute pancreatitis and gallstones.

Diseases are likely to become more prevalent as the counterfeit market expands along with Ozempic’s growing popularity.

Mackey noted that there are about 30,000 to 40,000 active illegal online pharmacies that 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 work with their healthcare provider to make sure that semaglutide is even right for them in the first place, and then only get it from a legitimate, licensed pharmacy in order to make sure that their treatment not be compromised,” Mackey told The Post. .