Online resale giant eBay has worked with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to block the sale of almost two million illegal medicines last year, the e-commerce company exclusively told C+D last week (January 9).
“We have been working closely with the MHRA to develop cutting-edge AI algorithms to block the sale of illegal or unsafe medicines in the UK,” an eBay spokesperson said.
“In 2024, these algorithms successfully recognised and blocked nearly two million violations for unregulated prescription medicines and over-the-counter (OTC) medicines before they could be offered for sale to the public,” they added.
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MHRA deputy director of criminal enforcement Andy Morling told C+D that this is an example of “a really good success story” of the work the agency does with online sales platforms and technology companies.
“We’d like to see more of that...to stop [illegal posts and listings] going online in the first place,” he said.
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Morling acknowledged that this sort of regulation can be “challenging” but stressed that “there’s always more that can be done”.
“Prevention is the name of the game, I think the work we do with eBay is really indicative of the sort of collaboration we want to have with tech companies,” he added.
“Noisy threat”
Taking counterfeit weight loss drugs as an example, Morling told C+D in an exclusive interview last month (December 19) that they are a “noisy threat” to the UK.
“There’s a lot of social media discourse and lots of media coverage generally” surrounding them, he said.
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“While not the biggest threat we face because it’s still relatively small in terms of the size of the illegal trade, it’s a noisy threat,” he added.
“[It’s] very low in number, but very high in the public consciousness and in potential seriousness,” Morling stressed, adding that there has been “significant public interest” in them.
“Demand went through the roof”
When weight loss drugs first entered the public sphere in the UK a few years ago, however, there was a “huge peak” in their illegal trade, he said.
“The demand went through the roof... criminals saw a chance to exploit this,” he added.
But the MHRA “did a lot of good work” to address that threat, Morling said, explaining that while the threat of illegal weight loss drugs now doesn’t “match up” to the amount of media coverage, “it is still potentially quite harmful”.
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The MHRA cracked down on counterfeit weight loss injection pens after identifying pre-filled semaglutide 1mg pens “falsely labelled as the diabetes medicine Ozempic” at two UK wholesalers in October 2023, seizing hundreds of pens.
“And that looked like it broke the back of the problem,” Morling said, noting that the MHRA hasn’t seized “any of those products in the last year”.
“So I think we responded very quickly to this and we nipped it in the bud,” he added.
“Ring of steel”
Turning to the UK’s regulated supply chain, Morling stressed that “we don’t find counterfeit products in this chain”.
“It has a ring of steel around it” he said, stressing that the MHRA does everything it can with “colleagues across the agency and across the government to secure it and make it impenetrable, which practically speaking, it is”.
“And that’s a huge win, because that means the public can trust the regulation [and that] the medicine they get from their pharmacist will be the genuine product,” he told C+D.
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Speaking in the same exclusive interview with C+D, Morling also last month revealed that the MHRA took down 150 social media posts “actively” selling counterfeit weight loss drugs in 2024.
And the regulator last month (December 30) warned people against buying weight loss medication without a prescription from “beauty salons, websites and on social media”.
