Kelly is aware that she should have been more careful when she signed up for a weight-loss medication online.
“It’s not like alcohol where you’ve got the option to abstain,” she says.
“You have to eat.”
In May, she signed up for a subscription with Zealthy, a telehealth company she found through Google.
She quickly noticed her food cravings and appetite had decreased.
About six weeks later, she noticed she was losing weight.
But then the billing got weird.
In October, her medication never arrived; the company blamed shipping delays on hurricanes in Florida.
She canceled the card she had on the account to prevent further charges.
Zealthy didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The topic of embarrassment came up throughout our conversation.
“My pants don’t fit if I so much as look at a cookie,” she says.
The experience with Zealthy only added to this sense of ostracism.
For people struggling with their weight, these drugs can seem like a miracle.
But not everyone has been so lucky.
In Kelly’s case, she’s out a chunk of money.
For others, the consequences are not only financial but medical.
“It’s just exploded so fast.
There’s so much money to be made here.”
It can be hard to discern a safe, legitimate offer from a dupe.
Even big-name telehealth companies are sending medications to patients without a lot of supervision.
They see others getting results, and they want the same.
“You don’t see this with cancer treatment.
You don’t see this with blood-pressure medications.
You don’t see this with antibiotics,” Bartfield said.
“This is a very unique field, and I can appreciate the appeal.”
“I mean, Jane Fonda tells stories of mailing away for tapeworms,” Mehlman Petrzela said.
And people were like, ‘OK, whatever, if it makes you skinny.'"
After a consultation, she was denied.
(She’s quite thin and pretty clearly didn’t need them.)
She’d missed it because the purchases were categorized as “groceries.”
“That’s the danger.”
The account stopped responding after he asked where the medication shipped from.
It’s a key in of conversation he’s had often and alerted lawmakers and TikTok to.
“Fraudsters are very attuned to cultural moments and what is attractive to consumers,” Jabbara said.
“They’re very keen marketers.”
But the reality is that everyone is operating in a bit of a gray area.
There are some confusing wrinkles.
The FDA took tirzepatide off its shortage list in the fall, which should have meant no more compounding.
But after a compounding trade group sued the FDA over the decision, it said it would reevaluate.
The cat’s already out of the bag.
He added that telehealth and direct-to-consumer GLP-1 sales circumvent many of the checkpoints in traditional prescribing.
“Oversight agencies are cut out,” he said.
That’s assuming their doctors will prescribe them, which, some won’t.
But GLP-1 medications do seem to have put this dynamic into overdrive.
These drugs really areeverywhere in commercials, on social media, in the news, in conversations.
And everyone’s getting into the semaglutide game: diet companies,gyms, evengrocery stores.
Maybe this will all turn out fine.
Sure, there will be scams; that’s true of everything.
But that’s not the only possible outcome.
When people fall for traps or scams, they’re often hesitant to admit it or advertise it.
Society often treats being overweight as a moral failure and using a medication to take off pounds as cheating.
Kelly hasn’t given up on semaglutide altogether.
She’s switched providers she’s now getting her medication from Hers and continues to shed weight.
The experience is “night and day.”
She thinks the reluctance was part of what landed her in a bad spot in the first place.
“That makes patients like myself especially vulnerable for fraud in the telemedicine world.
“So we turn a blind eye to the risks.”
Emily Stewartis a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
