Would you inject chemicals into your body without knowing with a high degree of certainty what they were?
Potentially half of all those using weight loss jabs in this country are doing just that – by buying on the black market.
My investigation into the booming world of illegally-sold injectables reveals not only a myriad of simple scams and cons, but a burgeoning trade in GLP-1 pens – largely made in China – containing vastly greater doses of Mounjaro than are safe to take, putting those who inject them at serious risk.
With an estimated one in 20 Britons now using weight loss jabs and availability still limited on the NHS, people are increasingly turning to black market sources.
It seems crazy to be exposing yourself to fraudsters, buying unlicensed medication and potentially injecting random chemicals into your body. But research by criminologists at Lincoln University estimates that half of those taking skinny jabs could be buying them illegally, meaning hundreds of thousands of people are risking their health – and their bank balance – by doing so every day.
When Eli Lilly, which manufactures Mounjaro, announced it would be trebling prices in September and subsequent panic buying resulted in shortages, I confess I did – briefly – consider dabbling in the dark side myself.
Via a website claiming to sell cheap tirzepatide – or Mounjaro – I did manage to get my hands on an illegal syringe pen
I have been taking Mounjaro for eight months. I’ve lost two stone in weight and I feel fabulous.
But faced with the prospect of having to pay over £165 a month for my dieting aid, or (unthinkable!) not being able to get my ‘fix’ at all as my weight nears the ‘healthy’ range, I joined the many respectable middle-class women scrabbling around in the murky world of counterfeit medications in search of a cheaper way to continue my GLP-1 habit.
In the space of a few weeks I was scammed, pestered and blatantly ripped off. But via a website claiming to sell cheap tirzepatide – or Mounjaro – I did manage to get my hands on an illegal syringe pen. I didn’t have to divulge any information about my weight or my state of health – and what’s more, the sellers claimed it was five times stronger than the strongest Mounjaro you can buy from legitimate outlets such as High Street or reputable online pharmacies.
That meant, if I was careful about eking out the doses, this illicitly bought mega-pen held enough clear liquid to suppress my appetite for 16 weeks. At a cost of £125, I’d be getting my monthly dose for £31.25.
On the High Street, that much would cost me £660.
But what its alleged strength also meant is that if I wasn’t careful, I could trigger severe and prolonged vomiting, diarrhoea and kidney damage which could keep me in hospital for days.
Of course, I also had no idea if it actually contained tirzepatide at all – to know that, I had to test it…
Let me be clear, I’m not advocating black market shopping for any medicines. The GLP-1 weight loss jabs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro are strictly controlled and should only be dispensed by a pharmacist, and only to those who are overweight or have health conditions.
But it is becoming increasingly clear that plenty of people like me are dipping into the black-market economy for these medications. In September, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) the Government body that monitors drug safety in the UK, revealed a 163 per cent increase in the number of weight-loss injection pens seized over a recent three-month span.
Let me be clear, I’m not advocating black market shopping for any medicines. The GLP-1 weight loss jabs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro are strictly controlled and should only be dispensed by a pharmacist, and only to those who are overweight or have health conditions
And last week Santander issued a warning that fat jab scams have trebled since January with fraudsters trying to capitalise on our desperate desire to lose weight.
Dr Luke Turnock, a criminology lecturer at the University of Lincoln, has been studying the growth of this illegal market.
It was his survey (of 600 people taking weight loss medication) which revealed that only 45.5 per cent admitted to buying
their syringes from legitimate online pharmacies.
‘It was only a small online survey, but it does point to a potentially very large volume of illicit market purchases – maybe as much as 50 per cent,’ he tells me.
He says the black marketeers are following a long-established sales blueprint set up to illegally sell anabolic steroids to body builders. Laboratories predominantly in China have switched from manufacturing steroids to making skinny jabs, which are then imported through the same channels and sold on privately, often through gyms or hair and beauty salons, many of which advertise on TikTok.
You’d think the international trade in illegal drugs would be underhand and mysterious, but by typing ‘GLP-1s’ into the TikTok search engine, I was able to view a video of a young British man demonstrating the steps required to convert a small bottle of GLP-1 powder into the liquid required for injecting.
One click to his profile page and another click on a ‘shop’ link took me to a range of peptide powders and syringe pens in branded boxes for sale.
It wasn’t long before fake pharmacies and peptide shops were spamming me with short video clips and poorly written endorsements (‘Hi babes guess what??? half a stone gone xxx’ ‘lost 10lb already and iv had a few wines in the weekends lol I’m well happy!’).
A large part of the social media marketing appears to focus on selling ‘Reta’ or Retatrutide, which is the hotly awaited next generation weight-loss jab. Reta promises to be more powerfully effective than Wegovy or Mounjaro, both of which are regulated in the UK, which means it is technically a crime to sell them without prescription (though you’re not committing an offence by buying them).
But because ‘Reta’ is still undergoing trials and is not legally available to buy, black marketeers can exploit a regulatory loophole, selling it to anyone who asks ‘for research purposes only’.
I’m not interested in the idea of injecting myself with a drug that is still on trial, so decide to put my focus on tirzepatide – the peptide used in Mounjaro.
Modifying my TikTok search, I find a website called PurePharmas selling a 10mg vial of tirzepatide powder for £90. Legally bought, the 10mg syringe pen would cost around £240.
The vial is stamped ‘sterile lyophilized powder’ which sounds impressive, but the website is glitchy. When I place my order I receive an email from ‘Brent Jayden, sales manager’ addressing me as ‘Sir’ and asking me to put £110 (£90 plus £20 shipping fee) into a private bank account.
Dr Turnock explains that black marketeers often insist on a bank transfer or paying through Western Union to prevent buyers cancelling the transfer down the line.
Ten hours after receiving my payment, Brentt (this time spelling his name with two ts) emails to say my order has been shipped and he provides a tracking number for the shipping agency… which then emails to say my ‘discreet package’ has been put on hold for a ‘refundable insurance fee of £100’.
This smells bad. I tell Brent/Brentt I refuse to pay another £100 and ask for reassurance. He responds, ‘I can fully guarantee you that it is not a scam’.
It is clearly a scam. The package never arrives, and my subsequent emails are ignored. Brent/Brentt has disappeared.
I may have had a lucky escape. I read one woman’s story on a Facebook support group saying she ended up at A&E having a CT scan after an unwitting black market-sourced jab overdose – she’d lost feeling in both legs, and the doctors suspected neurological issues.
She reveals she’d bought the powdered GLP-1 concentrate illegally, read the instructions incorrectly and had given herself ten times the expected dose.
I narrow my search to the illicit sale of ready-filled syringes.
My search for black market equivalents leads me to a company called Alluvi Healthcare, which is selling branded boxes of tirzepatide (though the branding is not the same as my legally sourced supply).
A pen claiming to be 40mg strength is selling for £139.99 – the strongest concentration Eli Lilly legitimately produces is 15mg and costs upwards of £280.
When I speculatively click to put the syringe in my ‘basket’, I am asked for my phone number and receive a text saying: ‘Hello mate. We got your order… can we provide you the bank details for payment.’ That old chestnut.
When I ask if the product is ‘legit’, I’m sent a video of packages being lined up for dispatch and a text: ‘You got nothing to worry about madam our products are % 100 good (sic) and are pharma tested.’
I don’t believe him and click off the site.
As the spamming on my TikTok feed continues, I am drawn to a jazzy video directing me to a company which promises next day delivery on ‘Tirz’ (tirzepatide) or ‘Sema’ (semaglutide – the peptide in Ozempic and Wegovy).
They’re offering a 80mg pre-filled syringe pen. An 80mg label indicates there is 80mg of concentrated tirzepatide suspended in water in the syringe – users can divide this into measured doses. So this syringe could potentially deliver 16 x 5mg doses of tirzepatide for just £125. With four doses in a legitimate 5mg pen the equivalent cost of 4 x 5mg pens would be around £660.
Proper syringe pens are dose- specific and contain four set doses of anything from 2.5mg to 15mg of peptide solution. You slowly twist a plunger dial on the end of the pen, clicking it out until a figure ‘1’ appears in a small window to indicate a full dose.
Having fixed a tiny disposable needle to the end of the pen, you press down on the plunger and the dose is delivered.
This pen is clearly more DIY, putting the user in control of the size of dose delivered.
I hesitate for a few hours and receive a prompt in the form of a discount code offering me 10 per cent off. This mega pen can be mine with one click through ‘Apple Pay’.
Like many black market suppliers I find during the course of this investigation, this website describes its products as ‘not suitable for human use’ and ‘for research purposes only’ as a legal get-out clause.
But the MHRA (Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, which ensures medicines are safe for the public to use) says this does not provide exemption – and buyers clearly ignore it.
No one is more surprised than me when the syringe pen arrives the next day via Royal Mail, backed up by an email asking me to ‘rate my purchase’.
It looks very similar to an ordinary Mounjaro pen, except it feels flimsy and is a fetching shade of two-tone purple instead of medicinal grey.
The pen arrives in a plain black box with a glittery sticker on the side, a pack of 10 needle tips, 10 disinfecting alcohol wipes and a photocopied sheet of instructions.
Dr Turnock’s study, published this year in the journal Drugs, Addictions and Health, notes that sometimes these illegally supplied medicines are the real deal if the product has been stolen or ‘redirected’ from the legitimate supply chain.
However, his study shows ‘a significant proportion of illicit medicines may also be counterfeit, falsified, unlicensed or substandard [and] produced in countries like China, India and Russia…’
Dr Turnock tells me my purple mega-pen may have arrived from China ready-filled, but any active ingredient is more likely to have been transported as powder (which doesn’t need to be refrigerated) and the syringe pens filled in a British or European warehouse.
‘Either way, these places do not follow clinical guidelines,’ he warns. ‘You have no way of knowing the quality of the product or whether it has been mixed with sterile bacteriostatic water as it should be.’
Notwithstanding the risk of bacterial infection from injecting unknown microbes into your skin, the bigger worry for anyone foolhardy enough to use counterfeit medication is that you just cannot be sure of the dose. Dr Turnock says previous investigations have found concentrations up to 39 per cent higher than advertised, or significantly lower.
‘This points to a very real risk of overdose,’ he warns. ‘If a user finds they get little response from one source they might switch provider or increase the dose on the next batch with no idea of the concentration of the product in any given syringe pen.’
At best, a GLP-1 overdose could lead to a protracted stay in hospital with extreme vomiting and diarrhoea. Hypoglycemia (dangerously low blood sugar levels caused by the medication forcing the pancreas to release excessive insulin) can lead to seizures.
More serious overdose side-effects can include pancreatitis, kidney damage and intestinal obstruction. There is no antidote for an accidental overdose.
The only way to find out what’s in my purple pen is to get it tested, so I send it to a UK laboratory for assessment.
I fully expect the pen to contain water, or perhaps dilute semaglutide (which is cheaper than Mounjaro), or a toxic mix of random liquid horrors. But to my surprise, the results show my purple mega-pen does indeed contain tirzepatide (at 99.88 per cent purity).
The lab is unable to verify whether the concentration is 80mg as declared, but Chris Bray, CEO of independent peptide testing and verification company, PeptideVerify, helps demystify the lab results.
He explains that only 50 per cent of the pen’s content is tirzepatide, with the remaining 50 per cent being made up of impurities such as peptide fragments and manufacturing by-products.
‘These aren’t necessarily harmful, but they do mean the product is less concentrated and less clean than a properly manufactured pharmaceutical-grade version,’ he says.
He estimates the strength, or concentration, is likely to be closer to 40mg rather than 80mg, but even if that’s the case, 40mg is still almost three times stronger than the strongest pen legitimately produced by Eli Lilly.
Injecting it without knowing what you are doing could cause serious harm.
The MHRA has issued strong warnings that counterfeit jabs can contain toxic substances that can be fatal, making it clear that dosages can be so dangerously high (due to unregulated manufacturing processes), they could even kill users.
I asked the testing laboratory to destroy what was left of my purple pen and I have forwarded details of all my black-market communications to the MHRA and also to the makers of Mounjaro, Eli Lilly.
Buying weight loss injections on the black market might be deceptively easy, but it is extremely dangerous.
Like any black market drug, you are playing Russian roulette with your health – which is a risk no one should take.