Prescription Drug Freight Fraud Report, June 2025

What if your tirzepatide shipment came from a Brazilian beauty clinic? Or a vial of semaglutide was manufactured, supposedly, at a Costco in Toronto?

In April and May 2025, dozens of shipments of semaglutide, tirzepatide, apixaban, and antibiotics entered the U.S. from facilities that aren’t in the FDA’s drug manufacturing database. These aren’t low-volume personal-use shipments; we looked at freight-scale imports, the kind used for resale or compounding.

One 15-kilogram tirzepatide shipment came from a trading company in China registered to a grocery store address. That shipment, enough for 6 million doses, was flagged and refused, but others weren't.

We found examples of weight-loss drugs declared as coming from private homes, shopping plazas, or completely unregistered facilities. Even more troubling were chemotherapy drugs mislabeled as antibiotics; a tactic we call product code fraud that can mask the identity of high-risk or counterfeit products in transit.

We don’t actually believe semaglutide is being brewed in a Canadian strip mall. But if a shipper is comfortable enough to list that as the origin, what does that say about their confidence in getting through?

Download our handout to learn more about these shipments.

See our full list of suspect shipments here.