Britain’s Weight-Loss Pill Pushers Are Making Millions While Regulators Look the Other Way

In several British towns and cities, a striking new advertisement spans the side of double-decker buses. It promises a transformed life, a simple path to weight management and wellbeing. It proclaims “The Weight is Over” alongside the name of the weight loss service provider, a company called Voy. To most people, it is pretty standard corporate marketing. To anyone with any knowledge of the UK’s medicines advertising regulations, it represents a blatant challenge to an ineffectual enforcement system. Timed to coincide with the licensing of a new oral weight loss drug, it closely replicates imagery used in marketing and patient support materials by the drug’s manufacturer Novo Nordisk.

Following complaints about this advertisement, Menwell Ltd, trading under the consumer brand Voy, is yet again under investigation. This latest probe follows a sustained string of previous adverse findings by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA). The core issue linking all these previous findings and the current investigation is the unlawful promotion of prescription-only medicines (POMs), specifically GLP-1 weight-loss medicines such as Wegovy and Mounjaro, to the general public.

These drugs are POMs for a reason. They are undoubtedly powerful medicines with the potential to provide great benefits to the right recipients, in the right circumstances, within defined parameters and under clinical supervision. However, they are not suitable for everyone and they also have the potential to cause side effects, including serious, possibly lethal, ones such as acute pancreatitis, bowel obstructions, acute kidney injury, acute gallbladder disease, optic neuropathy and thyroid tumours.

Under the UK’s Human Medicines Regulations 2012, advertising POMs to the public is not a minor concern – it is potentially a criminal offence. Yet, despite repeated violations across social media, targeted digital campaigns, and now these latest complaints and investigations about public transport advertisements, Voy has so far faced zero financial penalties, zero operational suspensions, zero professional sanctions and zero criminal prosecutions. One is compelled to ask an obvious question: how many offences must a company commit before regulators take real, deterrent action? Or in this particular case, how many second chances will regulators give to Voy?

The current game of cat and mouse between Voy and the regulators exposes a deep systemic flaw in UK regulatory and legal frameworks. The ASA, which handles most complaints about advertising, is a self-regulatory body with a toolkit basically limited to ‘naming and shaming’. When the ASA upholds a complaint against Voy, it orders the ad to be removed. Voy complies, tweaks the language or imagery, and then launches a fresh campaign. By the time the slow machinery of regulatory investigation catches up to the new ad, the promotional cycle is complete, market share has been captured, the revenue has been banked and the company has already moved on to its next marketing campaign.

A review of recent findings exposes Voy’s history of regulatory breaches:

• A Google advertisement promoted POMs to the public (September 2025): The ASA banned this advertisement and told Voy “not to promote POMs to the public in future”.
• MHRA Enforcement Action (December 2025): The MHRA forced Voy into a settlement after a formal review of its marketing campaign for a weight loss product. The MHRA expressed concern that there was implied endorsement of the product by a healthcare professional in contravention of the Regulations. The MHRA was also concerned that links in an advertisement presented consumers with promotional information about POMs. Voy agreed to amend its marketing.
• Social Media Influencer Network (February 2026): The ASA banned a series of influencer posts on Instagram where individuals shared “before and after” pictures alongside personal discount codes for Voy. One specific ad boldly claimed, “A year ago today I was fat… go see if you are eligible for Voy’s medicated weight loss”, using prohibited associated links to funnel the public towards purchase of Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro.
• “Urgent” Black Friday e-mails (May 2026): The ASA upheld two complaints against Voy for sending promotional e-mails that explicitly named prescription medications while offering urgency-driven holiday discounts. Backed by MHRA guidance, the ASA ruled that pressuring consumers with time-limited discounts for medicines was socially irresponsible and “encouraged a rushed transactional decision”.

Voy’s repeat offending is not an isolated case. It mirrors a highly profitable marketing tactic adopted by several other companies providing weight loss services and medicines, who also appear to treat regulatory warnings as a mere cost-free inconvenience of doing business.

For example, MedExpress has been found by the ASA to have breached regulations regarding online weight loss prescription drug promotion on two occasions, including targeting vulnerable new mothers struggling with post-partum body image.

A company called Second Nature Healthy Habits Ltd was found by the MHRA to have promoted POM weight loss medicines to the public in January 2025, only to be found to have committed the same offence again in September 2025. The MHRA administered a similarly ineffective slap on the wrist to Healand Clinic Ltd for the same reason in February 2025, only to have to repeat the exercise again in August 2025.

Fella Health Ltd (trading as Fella Health, later Bolt Healthcare/Bolt Pharmacy) also has multiple regulatory breaches to its name: two MHRA rulings against it in 2025, plus two ASA rulings and one MHRA enforcement action in 2026. All relate to repeated unlawful promotion of prescription-only weight-loss medicines to the public.

But regulatory timidity does more than just foster recurrent non-compliance amongst a few – it actively invites an endless stream of new participants to join the party. A look at the MHRA’s website over the last four years reveals an unabated stream of new weight-loss offenders being named month after month, each running their own violative campaigns. As the regulators rely on toothless warning letters rather than punitive sanctions, even a first-time offender can easily judge that the risk is entirely worth taking. The opportunity to have at least one incredibly lucrative, penalty-free bite at the non-compliant weight-loss cherry is simply too tempting to resist. This temptation is undoubtedly great and becoming greater all the time. The total annual UK private market spend on prescription weight-loss medication is currently estimated at £210 million to £250 million. It has been expanding at a rate of 13.3% to 16.3% every month since early 2024, and the recent arrival of oral POM weight loss medicines in the UK is unlikely to reduce these already phenomenal growth rates.

One might be excused for suspecting that, for many in the weight-loss business, their strategy – based on a risk/benefit equation – is clear. Flood the market with illegal ads, secure a massive wave of private subscriber revenue, then wait for a gentle regulatory slap on the wrist months after the profits are securely in the bank.

However, if such illegal advertising is allowed to proceed unchecked, the rot will spread more deeply, and more dangerously, than mere non-compliant marketing tactics. The relentless push for customer acquisition has already led directly to critical clinical safety failures, putting Voy and others in the cross-hairs of the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC), the professional pharmacy regulator. This followed damning media exposure in February 2026 by BBC journalists who revealed that online pharmacies Voy and MedExpress were distributing POM weight loss drugs with “no further verification” beyond automated questionnaires and out-of-date photos. Undercover reporters successfully purchased injections by providing entirely false medical data and fake GP addresses. The GPhC publicly declared itself “very concerned” by these systemic failures, confirming that it was investigating the concerns raised about Voy by the BBC investigation. The GPhC also said it had issued MedExpress with an improvement action plan after an inspection and that it would be “following this up to re-check compliance with our standards and guidance”.

But Voy and MedExpress may not be alone on the GPhC naughty step. An ITV News investigation in January 2026 exposed how a reporter easily obtained prescribed weight-loss drugs from three online pharmacies using simple digital editing software to alter her photos to look overweight. In response, the GPhC stated that it was deeply concerned by the findings. It immediately took regulatory action against the three unnamed pharmacies involved, failing two on their subsequent inspections for not meeting the required clinical and safeguarding standards. As a result of these scandals, the GPhC’s Chief Pharmacy Officer Roz Gittins has warned that prescribers are legally mandated to independently verify a patient’s BMI and health metrics before releasing these drugs. Failing to do so bypasses essential due diligence, risking the health of vulnerable individuals, including those struggling with eating disorders.

The irony is that, as the UK’s principal statutory pharmaceutical regulator, the MHRA does not lack teeth; it simply chooses not to bite. Under the Human Medicines Regulations 2012, the agency possesses a formidable arsenal of latent statutory powers explicitly designed for use against repeat offenders. If the MHRA chose to escalate beyond constantly emphasising “voluntary compliance”, it could bring full criminal prosecutions resulting in unlimited corporate fines and individual prison terms of up to two years for company directors. It also has the executive power to mandate costly, public corrective retractions across the exact same media used to break the law. In the digital space, the MHRA can issue binding ‘take-down’ orders to seize domain names and terminate social media operations. At the infrastructure level, it holds the power to completely suspend or revoke the wholesale licences required to trade medical supplies.

In Australia, a similar slide towards Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) advertising has taken hold in the promotion of new POM weight loss medicines. However, unlike the MHRA, the Australian pharmaceutical regulator – the Therapeutics Goods Administration (TGA) – has actually issued fines for unlawful advertising of weight loss medicines. The fines are not enormous (tens of thousands of Australian dollars) but they send out more of a deterrent signal than the MHRA has so far managed. The TGA also makes it admirably clear in its press releases that it will use its enforcement powers and resources to protect the public and not to act as a free source of regulatory advice or consultancy for errant businesses. To underline this position, the TGA states in its press releases that “Health providers must understand their legal obligations before [my emphasis] advertising therapeutic goods.”

By failing to escalate these repeated advertising and clinical violations into immediate punitive sanctions, UK regulators are signalling to the market that repeatedly breaking the law can indeed be treated merely as an acceptable cost of doing business. Furthermore, the lack of financial or professional consequences creates an uneven playing field. Ethical businesses that follow the rules and prioritise patient safety are disadvantaged, whilst aggressively and repeatedly non-compliant, commercially driven digital clinics are effectively rewarded.

We will probably now have to wait many weeks, or even months, before we eventually hear whether the ASA or MHRA has decided that Voy’s latest wizard wheeze of an ad for oral weight loss medicines on the side of a bus is acceptable. But irrespective of that decision, the time for free regulatory advice, reminders, gentle warnings and empty promises of “tightened safeguards” has surely passed. We now risk the normalisation of DTC promotion of POMs in the UK as many pharmacy and healthcare businesses apparently see advertising regulations as nothing more than minor bumps in the road to greater profits. If the MHRA’s statutory powers and the GPhC’s professional fitness-to-practise procedures are truly meant to protect public health, they must immediately be deployed as a genuine deterrent. Regulators must fine non-compliant businesses and strip them of their licences and registrations. They must initiate real prosecutions – or admit that the regulations they are supposed to enforce no longer apply in this digital age, or even on the side of a bus.

Dr Alan Black is a retired pharmaceutical physician, having worked in and for the pharmaceutical industry for around 30 years. Prior to that he spent a number of years in laboratory and clinical medicine.