Ozempic, Wegovy and other new weight-loss drugs have proved so good at helping users shed pounds, they’ve quickly become a multibillion-dollar industry. The prescription-only medications have also been in consistently short supply, which is why they’ve grown increasingly popular — with scammers. Online con artists are luring victims with discount offers of Ozempic and similar drugs with no prescription required.
After they take the money, however, they deliver something their clients didn’t order — fake drugs, perhaps, or just the disappointment that comes when people realize they’ve been taken. A new report by threat researchers at McAfee found 176,871 phishing emails and 449 malicious websites tied to offers of Ozempic, Wegovy and semaglutide , the generic name for these drugs, from January to April 2024. Phishing attempts were almost 200% higher during the period than they were from October to December, the internet security company reported.
In addition, the researchers found that scammers were creating fake profiles on Facebook so they could run weight-loss-drug swindles there. Others took hundreds of fake offers to Craigslist — including 207 of them in a single day in April. Novo Nordisk originally developed the semaglutide it dubbed Ozempic as a treatment for Type 2 diabetes, but clinicians found that semaglutide could help people lose significant amounts of weight by suppressing appetite.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy .
