It began with a 2023 Facebook post claiming to offer a cure for diabetes. But what was uncovered was a web of deception built on false hope.
No one responded meaningfully to Mantebe Raphoto’s plea for help. No other member of the group responded with concern or caution about the post that had appeared as a comment in a Facebook group.
“I need help,” she wrote in the comment section of a group that operates like a marketplace for health products claiming to cure diabetes.
She explained the adverse effect of the promoted product she had purchased from the group for her mother-in-law.
“I need help. I bought three bottles for my mother-in-law. After finishing the first bottle, her body started swelling. I don’t know what to do,” she pleaded.
The woman from the Southern African country of Lesotho had turned to the Facebook group that once promoted the pill as a cure for diabetes. Now desperate and confused after witnessing the troubling reaction her mother-in-law experienced from the pill she had bought online, she began asking questions.
Far from the guidance or concern she had hoped for, the Facebook group administrator’s only response was a casual ‘okay.’
Raphoto made the comment two years ago. Since then, her Facebook account hasn’t been active. Calls and messages to her verified WhatsApp phone number, as well as attempts to contact her through Facebook Messenger, were unsuccessful.
For those with diabetes and hypertension, the group acts as an unregulated marketplace and information exchange. Every day, it features dozens of health disinformation posts promoting cures, the majority of which lack verified approval, dosage recommendations, or evidence of safety.
Raphoto had purchased one of those alleged curative health products after being convinced by testimonials and bold promises. She wasn’t alone. Facebook groups like that attract hundreds of members from all over Africa and beyond, drawn by the promise of hope and targeted by sellers who exploit illness for profit.
Raphoto’s experience is part of the evidence gathered over the last 20 months by disinformation and cyberthreats journalist Olayinka Shehu, who is investigating the tactics and actors behind the online sale of unregulated and unlicensed health products marketed as curative drugs to Africans.
The story began on a bright afternoon in December 2023, when a casual stroll through Facebook led to the discovery of a suspicious advertisement promoting a so-called cure for diabetes. The advertisement used a digitally-manipulated image, a deepfake video, and an AI-generated voice, all designed to convey credence to a curative product. A closer look at the Facebook page behind the advertising revealed a pattern: similar misleading strategies were being used to market a health product passed off as a curative product. Named GlucoPro, it was advertised as a diabetes cure. A further examination of the Meta Ad Library of the page uncovered a larger network of advertising promoting unverified cures for arthritis, hypertension, and high blood pressure, all of which used the same coordinated and misleading digital tactics.
Online research indicates that GlucoPro is a nutritional supplement, but it is unlicensed and unregulated. However, in Facebook groups, it is promoted as a diabetes drug. Members of one group were advised to switch from approved diabetes drugs to GlucoPro.
Dietary supplements are vitamins, minerals, and herbs that claim to improve health. According to the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), a dietary supplement label may make claims about health benefits. However, unlike medications, supplements cannot claim to cure, treat, or prevent disease.
It was the first time GlucoPro surfaced on the journalist’s Facebook For You Page, but it wouldn’t be the last. Content promoting GlucoPro continues to appear as part of a recurring wave of fraudulent health adverts taking advantage of the platform’s algorithmic reach.
Diabetes is caused by dietary and lifestyle habits, as well as genetics. Once diagnosed, it can only be treated rather than cured.
In 2021, the World Health Organisation reported that 24 million persons in Africa had diabetes, with 13 million of those cases going undiagnosed. This represents the world’s largest percentage of undiagnosed diabetes cases. Although there is no known cure for diabetes, on the Facebook group, GlucoPro is said to have been discovered as a cure.
Zee Seete, a woman from South Africa, believed this. She had fervently defended GlucoPro in June of 2024 after another South African, Ntobeko Mvunyiswa, had posted a comment on the same group labelling GlucoPro a scam. Mvunyiswa had commented that, after buying and using the alleged curative product, she did not see changes in her health.
But Seete had responded by claiming that her husband’s blood sugar levels dropped from 22.5 in April 2024 to 7.5 in June 2024 after using the purported drug. However, when contacted in July 2024 regarding the effectiveness of GlucoPro, she provided a different account, saying that the product was not a cure for diabetes as claimed by an advertisement. She said claims of its effectiveness were fraudulent.
Seete said her husband, who has type 2 diabetes, began using GlucoPro along with the prescribed drug medication Synjardy in February 2024. “For a month, we used GlucoPro with Synjardy, and I was gushing over how his blood sugar levels dropped. After a month, he used GlucoPro alone. We didn’t check his blood sugar during that time, so after the capsules were completed, we tested to make sure it was still low. To our surprise, it was 19.5, which is extremely high.”
Seete’s introduction to GlucoPro came through an ad that appeared on her Facebook For You Page. She shared a screenshot of the advertisement offering GlucoPro as a diabetes cure, which she said had shown up on her For You Page.
The GlucoPro promotion content ran on an account with the profile name Zandile Maseko. The account’s profile picture, however, was subjected to a Google Lens image-reverse search and found to belong to South African podiatrist Tshidi Malehlohonolo Mbonani, and not Zandile, as alleged by the account. Zandile Maseko is a common name among South Africans.
Yamkela Kabese has the same story. She bought GlucoPro for her husband who is battling diabetes after becoming aware of it online.
She said, “I paid R3,700 ($208 or N319,037) for a GlucoPro package that had 8 bottles of tablets, using my last money to buy those tablets for my husband. He used them for three months, and there was no change in his health.”
Who is behind the GlucoPro campaign and just how big is it?
It was discovered that the sale of GlucoPro, and Cardioton, another supplement that was misrepresented as a curative product on Facebook, was not limited to South Africa and Nigeria. According to a Facebook analysis, people in six African countries – Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Lesotho – purchased GlucoPro because they thought it would cure their diabetes.
The investigation further unconvered 152 Facebook pages and 11 groups bearing the name ‘GlucoPro,’ which promote the purported diabetes cure across more than 10 countries, mainly in South America, Asia, and Africa.
Findings and details of GlucoPro operations, which include the pages and groups, were shared with Meta (the company that owns Facebook).
Since the pages and groups operate as corporate accounts with no identifiable individuals or corporations behind them, verifying the authenticity of the content is nearly impossible. The GlucoPro campaign exploits loopholes. By imitating the marketing and customer-engagment strategies of legitimate firms and leveraging Meta’s ad platform, it earns an undeserved sense of credibility among followers, many of whom believe GlucoPro effectively treats high blood pressure or diabetes.
Myanmar, one of the countries where GlucoPro was promoted, issued a health warning to its citizens in January 2023, stressing that it was not a cure for diabetes.
The GlucoPro network creates country-specific pages and groups to further create the idea that it is locally based. Targeted Facebook users are more likely to believe content that seems to come from within their own groups, so this strategy helps it to connect with them.
Beneath the facade of local presence, however, there is a coordinated, cross-border activity taking place. A thorough analysis of more than 150 pages and page administrator locations reveals a pattern of activity in several countries. While the front-facing pages and group activities are tailored for audiences in Nigeria, South Africa, Philippines or Honduras, the back-end activities often refer to offshore operations, sometimes linked to affiliate marketing schemes or disinformation merchants. Furthermore, the network handlers seem to have developed a well-thought-out strategy that conceals their financial objectives and reach, which are revealed by financial traces like ad spend. Digital evidence suggests that GlucoPro’s campaign was designed to fuse aggressive monetisation with calculated opacity.
Glucopro-Honduras, one of the pages found during an analysis on Facebook in November 2024, contained an Indian registered phone number connected to a dormant Facebook account name Maria Beliaeva and a business WhatsApp account name Nutratainment. After subjecting the account profile picture to Yandex reverse image search, it was discovered that the photograph belonged to a Russian, Nadezhda Kotkova.
The account appeared to have been used for the promotion of footwear on Facebook.
The phone number was also checked on Truecaller, a smartphone software that uses phone numbers to identify scammers and telemarketers. Truecaller identified the number as belonging to Nutratainment Spasmalir, registered in India.
A Google search of Nutratainment Spasmalir led to a Facebook page named Spasmalir-South Africa. Information gleaned from a search shows that Spasmalir is marketed as a gel to reduce joint pain, slow age-related degenerative changes, and treat radiculitis symptoms, including lumbosacral and cervical-thoracic types.
However, two Facebook reviews from previous customers describe the products as fake and a waste of money. Checks revealed that Nutratainment was not listed in the official registries in South Africa, Nigeria, or India, where investigation found its operations.
Searches were also conducted for variations of the name such as Nutra-tainment, Nutratainment and Nutritainment, alongside a manual lookup on the Indian Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) portal at https://www.mca.gov.in, under its search section The search revealed no active or inactive companies with any variation of the name exist in the MCA database .
The number was also discovered to be linked to another Facebook page name Volumin Guatemala, which has a Guatemalan location. Volumin is described as a natural tablet that helps to increase hearing and clean the ear canals.
An examination of the page revealed the email address, [email protected], which, when searched alongside [email protected] (another address linked to Nutratainment) and queried via AvatarAPI.com (an open-source tool for identifying names and profile pictures linked to email addresses), was found to be registered under the name Sanket Nutra. Sanket is a common Indian name of Hindi origin, while Nutra is a shortened form of the word ‘nutraceutical,’ which refers to dietary supplements that provide health benefits.
The email address, [email protected], was also found to be associated with another Facebook page, Sucrenorme-Cote d’Ivoire, which was last updated on March 3, 2025. The page promotes Sucre Norme, marketed as a diabetes treatment, and XNalo Spray, which is targeted at Senegal and is said to aid sexual health. Two Indian-registered phone numbers are associated with both Facebook profiles.
The email address was also found on Letfindout, an online directory of Indian businesses – perhaps indicating that Nutratainment is headquartered in New Delhi, India.
Additionally, an online search for Nutratainment online led to an about.me page, which describes Nutratainment as an online resource offering information on supplements for health and beauty.
The about.me link, however, directed to a suspended Nutratainment website. The suspended website was subjected to Wayback Machine, an internet archiving platform that captures screenshots of websites. Archived snapshots showed that Nutratainment positioned itself as a natural health supplement promoting foods and supplements. The site sold drugs such as Diafix, Diabextan, Glucoactive, Diabetic, and GlucoPro for diabetes; Hipanis for hypertension; and JointLab and Joint Cap for joint pain.
In 2021, the Republic of the Philippines Department of Health Food and Drug Administration advised against purchasing and using Vigorense and Diabextan.
All of the products on the Nutratainment website appear to have been primarily targeted at Asians, with the exception of GlucoPro and Diabetic, which are directed at Africans online.
Stop Diabetic is described as a potent organic supplement designed to help patients to efficiently control high blood sugar and diabetes. Stop Diabetic is one of the products promoted by a Facebook page, Laut Products, which markets unlicensed and unregulated health related products in Nigeria.
One of the websites (screenshots) promoting Stop Diabetics falsely used a stock photograph of a Black doctor (uploaded in 2014) and misrepresented him as Dr. Ibrahim Abdullah, who allegedly created it as a permanent cure for diabetes.
The doctor, who was shown as being interviewed, discouraged the use of metformin, a medicine used to treat high blood sugar levels, and instead advised readers to use Stop Diabetics, which was allegedly established in 2015 by Nigeria’s Institute of Endocrinology. However, the professional body focused on endocrinology in Nigeria is known as the Endocrine and Metabolism Society of Nigeria (EMSON), not the Institute of Endocrinology of Nigeria, as claimed by the website.
When contacted via WhatsApp, Hanisan Healthcare Private Limited, a research-based healthcare company engaged in contract manufacturing of pharmaceutical formulations, refuted the claim, stating that the product was manufactured as a supplement for diabetic patients rather than a drug.
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Further investigation confirmed that Nutratainment was linked to an Indian affiliate and digital marketing company, Traffury, through a phone number and address found on the Nutratainment website and on an Indian business directory website, PoweredIndia.
Traffury and Nutratainment were also found to have the same contact person on PoweredIndia, Akash Gupta, who, according to his LinkedIn profile, is a previous director at Traffury, who left the company in 2024.
Traffury did not respond to an email inquiry requesting information about its link to Nutratainment, the Facebook pages and groups marketing GlucoPro and other health products online.
A check on PoweredIndia website three days after the email was sent shows that the Nutratainment page on the platform no longer exists.
Another health product found on Facebook, DiabeCode, said to fight against diabetes and promoted to Nigerians, was also linked to Nutratainment through [email protected], and an Indian registered phone number found on the page.
Nutritainment appears to be a Traffury-operated platform that only exists on the internet, via its website, social media, and online directories, to promote unlicensed and regulated health products, including GlucoPro.
At the time of writing this report, it remained unclear whether Traffury was formally contracted to run the Nutratainment campaign involving GlucoPro and other unlicensed and unregulated health products or operated independently.
This is the first part of an investigation into how Africans are being exploited on Facebook in the name of a cure for diabetes. The second part is here.
