A fraudulent TikTok account has garnered 12.6 million views and 51,000 followers by posting videos which deceptively suggest that a medical doctor endorses a “special coffee that burns fat” being sold via a link in the account’s bio.
That link ultimately leads to “LuckMise.com,” a website that ScamAdviser gives a Trustscore of 1—its worst possible rating—in a report it says has been requested by members of the public 1,400 times over the last six months.
The TikTok account routing traffic to that website is created in the likeness of board-certified plastic surgeon Dr. Richard J Brown, “The Real TikTok Doc.”
It uses a version of Dr. Brown’s profile picture and is composed entirely of fraudulent duets “with him”–duets that never actually happened.
Instead, Dr. Brown’s reaction to an entirely unrelated video has been deceptively edited to appear as though the doctor is endorsing the weight loss product.
“We turned detective on this to uncover the REAL doctor behind these FAKE videos that are selling potentially dangerous diet coffee,” says Jaymie Moran in an April 4, 2022 Instagram Reel.
The account had “blown up over a matter of weeks,” yet every video featured the same reaction from the same doctor, with the same caption, and the same song, which Moran found suspicious.
Using Google’s reverse image search feature, Moran was able to find that the doctor was one of TikTok’s most popular plastic surgeons, and that he was actually dueting a September 2020 video relating to a possible U.S. ban of TikTok under the Trump administration–not a weight loss coffee.
LuckMise or an affiliate of theirs has usurped Dr. Brown’s duet which now appears on the 16 virtually identical videos that have accumulated a total of nearly 13 million views.
At least three other accounts, each using Dr. Brown’s profile pictures and linking to the same weight loss coffee and penile enlargement supplement website, have also been created, evidently ready to launch when the first is inevitably banned.
But TikTok, responding to an anonymous report by Surgical Times, says this account doesn’t violate its Community Guidelines.
Surgical Times reached out to TikTok and LuckMise for comment.