Meet the ‘Phantom Doctors’: The A.I. Telehealth Boom and the Ads Selling Medical Illusions

You might not even stop when you first scroll past one. Smiling into the camera, a man in a white coat with a perfectly draped stethoscope describes how a “quick five-minute quiz” can result in a prescription for a weight-loss shot. He goes by Dr. Matthew Anderson, MD. A closer look reveals an Angolan phone number on the page, and previous posts indicate it was once owned by a gospel musician. In any real sense, there is no such thing as a doctor.

This is the bizarre, somewhat confusing world that Medvi has created. Two workers. Last year’s revenue was $41 million. A profit of sixty-five million. 2026 sales are expected to reach $1.8 billion. Companies with glass headquarters and rows of cubicles used to have numbers like that. Medvi is powered by affiliate marketers, compounded GLP-1 medications, and what its founder, Matthew Gallagher, has publicly referred to as an AI-built business, with ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok handling tasks that previously required copywriters, designers, and customer support teams. Technically speaking, it’s a remarkable accomplishment. Depending on your perspective, it’s also a subtle ethical catastrophe.

It’s difficult to ignore the scale when you stroll through Meta’s ad library on any given afternoon. Thousands of Medvi-linked advertisements, many of which bear the subtle visual cues that indicate AI generation, such as jumbled text in the background or a faint Gemini watermark in the corner of a profile picture that no one bothered to crop out. “Dr. Spencer Langford MD,” one profile, has roots in a Republic of Congo clothes store. “Wade Frazer MD,” another marketer, dropped the “MD” as soon as a reporter began questioning him. Three other accounts that promoted the same medications had the same headshot. Observing all of this gives me an odd feeling that falls somewhere between fear and absurdity.

When questioned, Gallagher said that Medvi complies with FTC regulations and removes troublesome affiliate advertisements when it discovers them. In a single weekend, the number of active campaigns fell from over 5,000 to about 2,800 after Business Insider voiced concerns. Sort of cleanup. It is another matter entirely whether it qualifies as the “reasonable program” of oversight that regulators anticipate. The National Consumers League’s Nancy Glick referred to it as “whack-a-mole,” and while the metaphor is accurate, it understates how profitable the mole has become.

All of this is part of a larger narrative. During the pandemic, telehealth took off and didn’t really slow down. The demand for GLP-1 medications and ADHD prescriptions kept the pipeline full, and by 2024, about three times as many physicians were treating patients virtually as in 2019. Some of the early stars faltered: the founder of Done, a startup focused on Adderall, was found guilty of healthcare fraud last fall, and Cerebral paid millions to resolve a federal overprescribing investigation. The pattern is recognizable. Go quickly, scale more quickly, and deal with the legality later.

The layer of artificial credibility that now sits atop all of this is new. Ten years ago, a real person who was willing to lie on camera was needed to create a fake doctor. The script is now written by a chatbot, the face is created by an image generator, and the entire operation is given a thin layer of legitimacy by a Facebook page that was taken over from a Congolese clothing store. Gallagher claimed that medvi.io was operated by an unidentified affiliate using his company’s name without authorization, despite the FDA’s February letter to him pointing out that the website made “false or misleading” comparisons to Wegovy. It’s the kind of explanation that might be accurate, but it still makes you uneasy about how unstable the entire ecosystem has become.

It’s difficult not to wonder what the floor looks like as you watch this happen. Think Global Health researchers have begun advocating for name-image-likeness protections for doctors, taking inspiration from the realm of Hollywood actors and collegiate athletes. In theory, the concept makes sense. In reality, platforms are reactive, regulators move slowly, and the economics of selling compounded semaglutide through synthetic doctors are currently exceptional. Until someone makes it costly to stop, the phantom will continue to operate.