Any American with a television has, by now, surely seen commercials for online pharmacies advertising GLP-1s and other popular prescription weight-loss medicines at bargain prices. You know the ones, where retired tennis stars or comedians you haven’t seen in 10 years tell you how wonderful, and easy to procure, these life-changing medications are.
It’s a huge business. Of the one in eight American adults who takes these drugs, 11 percent were prescribed and issued meds from online telehealth services, leading to a massive 24 percent projected annual growth rate in the sector. Some forecasters have predicted that the online weight-loss-drug market will grow to $150 billion in the next five years. The government is even getting in on the action with the recent launch of TrumpRx. Given the demand, the growth of the sector, and the sometimes spurious business practices that emerge when drug dealing is combined with the internet, it is perhaps unsurprising that not all the purveyors in the space are operating in good faith.
Some users have signed up for these services, submitted credit card data for a relatively modest membership fee, and woken up to massive credit card charges for GLP-1 meds they did not request. These meds are then shipped immediately, allegedly preventing the provider from reversing or canceling orders. When contacted, the companies will say they cannot accept returns or cancellations, citing vague “privacy” and “supply chain” concerns. Efforts to escalate these concerns are frustrated by managers who seem to always be tied up in meetings. Despite persistent calls, patients are left paying massive sums for meds they don’t even want.
I know, because it happened to me.
In March, I signed up for a service called FitRx—which also does business under the name Zealthy, Inc.—mostly to see the cost of compounded Zepbound. The website advertises an offer of $135 for a month’s supply. I registered, paid the membership fee, and answered some basic questions about my weight, medical history, and activity level. When I woke up seven hours later, I found a detailed message from a physicians’ assistant—who I did not communicate with directly—laying out my new “plan.” I also found I was charged $866 and had been sent a three-month supply of tirzepatide vials that I had been prescribed, despite neither asking for or needing them. No effort whatsoever was made to check if these unwanted medicines were covered by insurance.
I spent the better part of the next week arguing with customer service reps at FitRx and Zealthy about their cancellation rules. (With FitRx, this almost always involved dialing in to be cheerily greeted by the same dude, who would only identify himself as “Ace.”) They explained that they have a policy about not refunding any orders after shipping labels have been printed. I explained that I, too, have a policy: Do not take money from me without asking. Having involuntarily adjusted my personal policy in my dealings with FitRx/Zealthy, perhaps they, too, could make an exception? No dice. I called the shipper, FedEx, which said that it was completely within the provider’s capacity to cancel a shipment before it had been mailed out. I refused the delivery of the vials and had them returned to the sender, an intermediary pharmacy in Texas). The process was mind-breakingly frustrating, seemingly by design. And I’m not the only one who feels this way.
Shane Albert—who like other people in this story spoke to WIRED using a variant of his name out of concern for his privacy—first heard about Zealthy on an Atlanta radio station. Like a lot of people, he was looking to drop a few pounds. He had some success with semaglutide (prescribed as Ozempic and Wegovy) but wanted to level up to the even more powerful tirzepatide. He recalls Zealthy advertising tirzepatide (prescribed as Mounjaro and Zepbound) and being impressed with the price.
“It said it’s going to be the same price every month,” he recalls, “which I later learned was a crock of shit.”
Albert’s experience went smoothly—at first. He was charged for his drugs, received them through the mail, and took them. Then things took a turn. When he was billed for his second round of the drug, at an increased dose, the price went up. When the tirzepatide finally did arrive, it was weeks late. And because these compounds work due to regular weekly injections, allowing the active ingredients to build in the patient’s system, he ended up regaining the weight he had already lost during the extended waiting period.
Albert complained—or tried to. Weeks went by without responses. He’d spend hours hanging on hold, going a little batty as the chipper hold music looped infernally. He tried to remove his credit card from the website and was unable to do so, eventually having to call his bank to order a new card. He was beyond annoyed. “I even threatened to file complaints against their professional licenses, and it didn’t trigger anything,” he says, his voice peaking as he recounts his experience. “They hope we’ll just go away, by not responding to us and not entertaining us. But I didn’t. Because it was a lot of money.”
Nicole Butler is another unsatisfied Zealthy customer. She says her delivery of a three-month Zepbound supply was left outside in the North Carolina midsummer sun; its cooler bags melted, potentially spoiling the drug and rendering it useless. A refund was, apparently, impossible. She spoke to her credit card issuer about investigating the charge. She filed a complaint with Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services (JAMS), a consumer advocacy group. Despite her protests, monthly membership charges kept being processed. “I was furious,” Butler says. “It was very hidden and just really slimy, the way that they do it.”
“The obese world is a white-collar crook’s dream,” alleges Sarah Harris, another former customer who claims she was bilked for more than $1,500. She turned to Zealthy back in 2024, when her doctor refused to prescribe semaglutide to her because the treatment was, in Pullen’s words, “still newish.” Her insurance wouldn’t cover any weight-loss drugs. So, if she wanted to try them, she’d have to pay out of pocket.
After enrolling, Harris received initial orders. The meds worked. She says she was sent tracking numbers for shipments that never came, with tracking numbers pegged to old orders. When she tried to cancel her membership, she had to go as far as ordering a new debit card. “If people like me want to lose weight and can’t afford the monthly $1,000-plus out-of-pocket expenses, we become targets for companies like Zealthy,” she says. “I wouldn’t buy toilet paper from them.”
Neither Zealthy’s CEO—a rescue-dog dad and Wharton School dropout named Kyle Robertson, who bills himself as a builder of “transformative companies”—nor its listed legal representatives would respond to repeated requests for comment. A Zealthy customer service rep, a mononymous “Jojie” who would not confirm their surname, told me that I should “keep an eye on [my] inbox” where I could “expect a response directly via email.” It, of course, never came.
When my questions went unanswered, I presented myself unannounced at Zealthy’s offices near Manhattan’s Union Square on a Monday morning, in hopes of speaking to someone directly. I was greeted (if that’s the right word) by a locked glass door, revealing an open-concept office space, empty save for a few young people cradling laptops in the crooks of their elbows. I knocked, and the door was creaked open, just slightly, by Robertson: spindly, unshaven, gauzy-eyed, and enormously tall. (His IMDB profile, which lists two daytime television appearances, has him at 6’5″.) When I attempted to put my questions to Robertson, he told me—with the sort of strained, passive-aggressive politeness that typified so many of my customer service interactions with his company—to “please leave.”
In 2024, the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission announced a suit against Robertson for, in part, “the use of deceptive, burdensome and convoluted cancellation practices.” Several of Robertson’s companies, including Cerebral as well as Zealthy, were named in the suit. A settlement that finalized in 2025 required Cerebral to pay out $5 million to aggrieved customers who could not cancel their subscriptions, as well as to “cease misusing and improperly disclosing patient information, misrepresenting its data privacy or security practices and misrepresenting its cancellation practices.” Now, it seems, Robertson is allegedly continuing these practices, with new companies, and new names. (In addition to FitRx, Zealthy also currently does business under the names RoenRx and AMRx via various reskinned websites, which are all registered to physical addresses linked to Zealthy.)
More recently, the DOJ filed for a preliminary injunction that would freeze Zealthy’s assets, and sought a court-appointed receiver for the company. The judge has yet to rule on this motion. An amended DOJ complaint against Zealthy for engaging in “systemic improper and dangerous telemedical practices” claimed that Robertson had perpetrated “wide-ranging lawbreaking that has harmed tens of thousands of telehealth patients.” According to the motion, in a Slack message sent in April 2025, an engineer at Zealthy wrote, “There have been so many illegal things Kyle makes ppl do it’s wild.” Robertson did not respond to requests for comment from WIRED about the proposed freeze or its effect on the future of his companies.
While the FTC could not comment on its lawsuit or the specific practices of any given company, the commission is advancing new rules about telehealth companies using what’s commonly called a “negative option.” As described in a recent FTC Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM), a negative option is “a common form of marketing in which the absence of affirmative consumer action constitutes consent to be charged for goods or services.” In other words: drugs prescribed and shipped without patient consent, credit cards charged without direct authorization, inscrutable cancellation policies, and other automatic opt-ins that seem to typify telehealth frustrations.
“It is an issue that consumers often complain about,” FTC spokesperson Juliana Gruenwald Henderson tells WIRED.
Christopher Maniscalco, a New Jersey attorney who monitors the pharma and telehealth spaces, has also noticed increased concern around the telehealth model, particularly with regards to consent and pricing transparency. Another issue is the practice of prescribing medications based on patient surveys, without direct contact with a medical professional. “Are these practitioners conducting valid telehealth encounters?” he asks. “Questionnaires don’t necessarily suffice to form that bona fide practitioner-patient relationship.”
Ali Garrison, a social media weight-loss influencer who operates the YouTube channel FitFlavorFun, has fallen down what she calls “the Zealthy rabbit hole.” There were Reddit threads and whole Facebook groups collecting stories of consumers who claimed to have been ripped off by the company. “One thing I tell people is to do a Google search,” she advises. “Company Name scams … Company Name reviews … I could go on and on about all problems various telehealths have had.”
Caveat emptor, as the old saying goes. And, in my own case, I am definitely guilty of conducting precisely zilch in the way of this sort of preliminary research. I forked over my Mastercard info to a telehealth website because it seemed glossy, professional, and otherwise sufficiently legit. (I have since canceled that credit card, as a precaution.)
It is perhaps revealing, though, that when I contacted the company not in my capacity as another disgruntled customer but as a reporter writing an article about its business practices, Zealthy was—by some miracle, or workaround in their otherwise ironclad terms of service—able to reverse its policy and refund my $866. When I asked if this was some sort of quid pro quo, offered in the interest of not investigating the company any further, “Jojie” also assured me that the “decision was made based on your account and experience, and not in connection with any external matters.” Of course, not every jilted client has the option of redressing their gripes by credibly threatening to write an article for a widely read tech and culture magazine.
“Do your homework,” unhappy Zealthy customer Shane Albert cautions. “You really do feel paralyzed. Because they got your money. And they got your hope. And they got your drugs.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
