Hundreds of websites are selling fake Ozempic, says company. Doctors say it's only going to get worse | CBC Radio Loaded
"But this is, on scale, a hundred times bigger," said Wharton, an internal medicine specialist at Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto and assistant professor at the University of Toronto who researches obesity medicine, including studies paid for by the company that makes Ozempic.BrandShield, an Israel-based cybersecurity company hired by a consortium of pharmaceutical companies, says it took down more than 250 websites selling fake versions of Ozempic and similar drugs in 2023.
"This is a growing problem worldwide in the past few years, especially since COVID, with an increasing number of fake pharmacies and counterfeited drugs being sold online, and impersonations on social media," BrandShield CEO Yoav Keren told"This is a problem across industries, not only necessarily pharma. The big difference here is that when you buy a fake drug, it can kill you.
BrandShield says it uses artificial intelligence to scan websites for signs of fraud, and makes its final decisions about which ones to target in collaboration with its clients.Asked if these sites could be selling generic or compound versions semaglutide, Keren was adamant: "We're talking about totally counterfeited drugs. They have nothing to do with the original drug that you're trying to buy.
Stigma and bias, he says, may also be driving people online, because they are either afraid to seek medical treatment for obesity, or are not listened to when they do. "So I'm not shocked to hear that people are turning to sketchy websites, to counterfeit websites, to try to make themselves smaller in an effort to conform to the really narrow ideas of what bodies should look like.""Which means that I don't focus on weight. I don't direct my patients to lose weight," she said.