Every Bangladeshi family knows the scene. My father is newly diagnosed with diabetes. The doctor's advice is the same as always: Medication, diet, regular monitoring, lifelong discipline. It is sound advice, and it is exhausting to follow.
Then his morning walk friend forwards a video to him. A man in a white coat promises a cure in seven days, with no injections and no side effects, for only Tk3,500 and cash on delivery.
This is not harmless chatter. It is a business, and its customers are dying.
A market built on fear
Diabetes is a lifelong condition for which no cure currently exists. That inconvenient truth is the foundation of a thriving commercial ecosystem on Facebook and TikTok: Fake doctors, unregistered supplements, and "miracle" pills sold to people who are frightened, tired, or simply priced out of regular care.
Social media is filled with products claiming to replace insulin or conventional medication with herbal alternatives, despite no credible scientific evidence supporting those claims. Patients each month require hospitalization after following unqualified health advice found on social media and resulting in liver, kidney, or cardiovascular complications.
Think about what that number means. Families continue to pay for someone else's marketing copy with their organs. Now think about the patients who never made it to a hospital.
The word "herbal" does a great deal of the sellers' work. In a country with a long and respected tradition of traditional remedies, "natural" feels "safe." It is not.
A product with no declared dose, no tested purity, and no registration is simply an unknown substance. The danger is greatest when a patient stops a prescribed drug because a post told them they no longer need it.
They borrow your trust
What makes this scam distinctly Bangladeshi is how skilfully it borrows trust. Fraudsters know we respect the doctor, the professor, and the familiar newspaper masthead, so they counterfeit all three.
Dr Jahangir Kabir, a prominent health advocate who promotes lifestyle-based approaches to diabetes, has said dishonest groups are misusing his name to sell unregulated medicines.
He reports that hundreds of fake Facebook pages were created in his name, some even mimicking his verified profile's blue-badge image. A man who tells people to change how they eat and live found his face on the label of a bottle.
He is not alone. Microbiologist Dr Senjuti Saha discovered that her name and image were being used in a fraudulent campaign and filed a general diary at the police station.
Dismislab traced the "Optimax" diabetes product to counterfeit pages mimicking Prothom Alo, featuring fake interviews with "prominent" Bangladeshi professionals.
Even the health minister's identity has been hijacked: iIn 2024 the ministry had to warn that fake Facebook accounts were being opened in his name, with advertisements that could cheat the public.
When the scammer can wear the face of a trusted doctor and the logo of a trusted newspaper, "just don't believe everything online" is not advice. It is an abdication.
The phone in every pocket
We have long assumed that more smartphones meant more awareness. The evidence is more troubling. Studies suggest that mobile phone ownership is associated with greater exposure to misinformation, not just greater access to information.
In a country where phones have reached the village before the specialist has, the same device that delivers a telemedicine consultation also delivers a "cure" for diabetes. In many cases, it is the second that arrives first.
Self-medication was already common long before Facebook. We buy tablets over the counter, trust a neighbour's prescription, and stretch a doctor's visit as far as it will go. Influencers did not create this habit. They have simply learned to monetize it.
What the media must do
Media professionals are not blameless. For years our response to health misinformation has been the occasional "myth-buster" column, published once, read by few, and forgotten by the next news cycle. The scammers publish daily. We cannot answer a daily campaign with an annual correction.
Newspapers need standing health fact-check desks, with trained reporters, a medical advisory panel, and the same institutional seriousness we give to political fact-checking. A fake diabetes ad should be treated with the same urgency as a fake political quote.
Television channels and online portals should produce short, shareable "spot the scam" segments in Bangla. Sixty seconds are enough to show a viewer how to check whether a doctor is registered with the Bangladesh Medical and Dental Council, why "cure in seven days" is a warning rather than a promise, and why no pill replaces insulin. Content that is easy to forward to the family WhatsApp group is how we compete on the scammers' own ground.
We should use AI sensibly. Newsrooms can deploy language tools, including Bangla-capable ones, to flag viral health claims, repeated ad creatives, and suspicious pages at a scale no human desk can match.
But AI should only flag. Verification, context, and the final call must remain with trained editors and doctors. A machine can tell us where the fire is. It cannot tell us whether the person in the video is really a physician.
This is consumer fraud
Finally, the media must stop accepting the framing that this is merely a "content moderation" problem. Content moderation means a platform deciding whether a post stays up.
What we are describing is the sale of unregistered medicinal products, under false identities, to sick people, for profit. That is consumer fraud and a public health offense.
The Directorate General of Drug Administration, the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, the consumer rights authorities and law enforcement all have a role.
So do Meta and TikTok, which earn revenue from the very advertisements that deceive our citizens.
The press should keep asking the uncomfortable questions: Who approved this ad, who was paid, who was prosecuted, and how many times was it reported before it came down?
The next time a "miracle cure" appears in your feed, remember what it is: Someone's sales pitch, aimed at your parent's fear.
Insulin is not a conspiracy, and diabetes does not end in seven days. The sooner we say so, loudly, every single day, the fewer families will learn it in a hospital corridor.
Dewan Shahnoor Alam Sourav is a lecturer in the Department of Media Studies and Journalism at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). Can be reached at ds.alam.sourav@gmail.com.