Xinhua News Agency, Tianjin, April 2 -
Question: cost thousands less than the price of 10 yuan, the US medical product counterfeiting Stopped?
——A warning issued by a fake case of "face-lifting" medical beauty products
Xinhua News Agency reporter Yin Siyuan
In recent years, the "economy of beauty" and "consumption of pleasure" have grown vigorously, and the medical beauty industry has sprung up in the ascendant.
The strong demand not only promoted the development of the market, but also gave birth to a lot of chaos in the industry.
Not long ago, a case of manufacturing and selling fake "face-lifting" medical beauty products came to an end in Tianjin, which once again sounded the alarm for people.
Why does micro plastic surgery have repeatedly changed to "dangerous plastic surgery"?
When will the fake medical products be closed?
Imitation and counterfeit drugs are packed in foreign packaging, and their value has skyrocketed by more than a hundred times
On February 1, 2020, a case involving the production and sale of counterfeit drugs was transferred to the People’s Procuratorate of Hongqiao District, Tianjin City. After investigators’ efforts, a criminal gang with sales of tens of millions of yuan across six provinces and ten places gradually emerged. water surface.
According to Du Ying, the prosecutor of the People's Procuratorate of Hongqiao District, Tianjin, Liang was originally a technician of a pharmaceutical company in Chongqing. After resigning in 2009, he has been engaged in cosmetics business for a long time.
Over the past ten years, he has trained his keen sense of market smell.
At the beginning of 2018, he heard about "Bao Tuoshi" from his colleagues.
According to peers, "Botos" is a clinical and cosmetic injection drug, produced overseas. It focuses on wrinkle removal and face-lifting. It has high tolerance, strong stability, and low sensitization. "Suitable" burns a lot of money. It costs two to three thousand yuan for a shot, and Liang has a bewildered mind.
In July 2018, through a friend's introduction, Liang met "Dr. Du" who had previously worked in a biopharmaceutical company.
After repeated trials, a complete set of production methods was polished: using simple fermentation to obtain the bacteria, use high-pressure equipment to collect the bacteria to break the bacteria, after special treatment to obtain the target protein, and then electrophoresis system quantification.
Then add the chemical substance to dilute it, put it in the freeze dryer and freeze-dry it with a rubber stopper.
In this way, a bottle of counterfeit Botox lyophilized powder with a reserve price of less than RMB 10 was born.
Investigators discovered that some counterfeit products were distributed to Sun.
In order to use fake products, Sun adopts the mode of separation of manufacturing and packaging, and sends the freeze-dried powder, instructions, labels, inner trays, and packaging boxes to the warehouse separately, and packs them by "his own person". "The version sold abroad.
In addition, the group also conducted simple beauty knowledge and packaging training for sales staff. With the help of online e-commerce platforms, WeChat groups, participation in beauty fairs, etc., the products flowed to many "black beauty salons" and personal plastic surgery studios. And consumers.
The price of this product in "black beauty salons" is generally more than 1,000 yuan, and the profit has increased by more than a hundred times.
Established the company's layered distribution chain to "perform each other's duties"
After "Dr. Du" successfully developed the counterfeit "Botos" product, Liang tried it out by himself and felt that "the effect is the same as the real one", so he distributed the samples to the customers for trial and gained some "acceptance".
After a market demand survey, "Dr. Du" and Liang plan to expand the industry.
To this end, starting from the end of 2018, the two have successively conducted process tests at the foundries in Rizhao, Shandong, Yongchuan, Chongqing, and Zhuozhou, Hebei, and produced several batches for external sales.
However, due to equipment problems, the product qualification rate is not high, and the foundry costs are high, so the two invested more than 1 million yuan to establish a company for mass production.
Although the funds are in place, the problem of insufficient manpower has gradually become prominent. "Dr. Du" found several "old friends" engaged in the biomedical industry and promised high remuneration to convince them to "invest in technology."
Several people knew that this was a counterfeit drug production, but thinking about the high returns brought about by "share dividends", they had the courage to do it.
When "Dr. Du" was looking for upstream "technical" support, Liang was not idle. Since the first batch of counterfeit products were made at the end of 2018, he actively expanded downstream sales channels, and gradually found several fixed positions in the medical aesthetics industry. Customer, and contacted Sun to distribute the product.
In order to better sell, Sun and others rented a villa as a "base camp" in a villa area in Jining, Shandong, and recruited a number of young salespeople to sell.
Sun promised to the salespeople: "There is no uniform price for the product, everyone can increase the price and sell it, and the price difference belongs to you; you are only responsible for selling the product, and the delivery and after-sales are all the responsibility of the company.
The sales channels were opened up, and several criminal suspects had the illusion of "success", but the counterfeit products always showed their feet.
A consumer who lives in Hongqiao District, Tianjin City felt unwell after buying and using weight loss products. He suspected that he had bought a counterfeit medicine and called the police.
After investigations, the public security organs arrested 11 major criminal suspects in Jining, Shandong, Wuhan, Hubei and other places, and seized botulinum toxin type A that counterfeited imported brands such as "Botos", "Powdox", and "White" 5 More than ten thousand sticks.
On July 15, 2020, the People's Procuratorate of Hongqiao District, Tianjin City prosecuted 11 major criminal suspects on suspicion of producing and selling counterfeit drugs.
On October 15, 2020, the Hongqiao District People's Court of Tianjin City accepted all the claims filed by the procuratorial organs and sentenced 11 people to fixed-term imprisonment and fines.
The chaos of medical beauty is inevitable after repeated bans, and beauty needs to be brightened
With the development of science and technology, medical cosmetology has changed from simple maintenance to more complex surgical treatment, and it is no longer exclusive to celebrities. More and more ordinary people are beginning to try to use medical methods to make themselves more beautiful.
The annual report issued by the China Plastic Surgery Industry Association predicts that by 2022, the size of the Chinese plastic surgery market will reach 300 billion yuan. The huge market has driven the rapid development of related industries and has gradually become a hotbed of chaos in the medical beauty industry.
Du Ying introduced that with the continuous strengthening of crackdowns in recent years, the medical aesthetics industry has become more and more abundant in the production and sale of counterfeit products, and the technology content is also getting higher and higher.
In this case, the R&D and production teams all have doctoral and master degrees, and most of them have bioengineering professional backgrounds and have R&D work experience in pharmaceutical factories.
"This research and development team is very professional, using some genetic engineering methods to imitate it. After expert identification, the medicine also has a certain face-lifting effect."
But effective does not mean safety.
Du Ying introduced that "Dr. Du" and other R&D and production personnel cannot guarantee a sterile environment when filling medicines. They just fill the medicine powder into the vial in a room of several square meters.
"Injecting such drugs into the body has a great health risk."
In addition, because my country has a strict drug access mechanism, in order to shorten the research and development time and take advantage of the brand-name effect, Liang and "Dr. Du" chose to make and sell fakes. The root cause is the huge commercial interests in the medical aesthetics market.
Zhang Baoyi, director of the Institute of Sociology of the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, believes that the frequent occurrence of chaos in the medical beauty industry indicates that there are still loopholes in the industry's supervision.
He said that it is not enough to rely solely on relevant departments for supervision. It is necessary to mobilize the power of industry associations and other non-governmental organizations to guide the direction of market development through the formulation of industry standards and other methods.
"Industry associations can conduct self-management from within, and this management is more direct than government supervision."
How to avoid "stepping on the pit"?
Related experts gave their own suggestions.
It is very normal for people to have medical aesthetics needs, but try to choose formal medical aesthetics institutions for beauty and plastic surgery, check the qualifications of relevant institutions and personnel, in addition to avoiding "cheap" thinking.
"The reason why this counterfeit'Botos' can sell so well is because the price is much cheaper than the genuine product. People should not only look at the price and ignore the quality when choosing products, which brings unnecessary risks to themselves." Ying said.