Medical Product Smuggling Operation in Konya: Kontv Report

This short Kontv Haber report shows a concrete case of medical product smuggling carried out online. Smuggling and organised crime teams of the Konya Provincial Police Department carried out the raid. They searched the workplace and home of a suspect selling medical products over the internet. The video is in Turkish.

What does the report cover?

According to the report, the search turned up 3,422 smuggled medical products: pills, gels, sprays and pastes. In the footage, officers count the products taken out of drawers and bags one by one. In short, smuggled goods do not only sit in large warehouses. They can also wait in the desk drawer of an ordinary shop.

The link between medical product smuggling and disposal

Smugglers had brought the products in this report past customs. However, the medical products that leak onto the market do not always come from abroad. Genuine products that never completed disposal, or that went missing on the road, can follow the same path. For example, an expired batch can go missing from a warehouse or a truck. It can then reappear online in small packs. What is more, the storage conditions of these products are unknown, so they pose a serious risk to patients’ health.

For this reason, fighting medical product smuggling is not only a job for the police. The maker or importer must also be able to prove that it destroyed every box set aside for disposal.

What should companies do?

• Right after the count, wrap the pallet in stretch film and close it with a dedicated security tape.
• Seal the transport vehicle with a serial-numbered seal that reveals any tampering, not with an ordinary cable tie.
• Have the disposal done at a licensed facility, stay on site and record it with photos and video.

Scrap carries out these steps at every stage of medical device and pharmaceutical disposal. It gathers the records on its client’s online tracking portal. For details, see our medical device waste disposal and pharmaceutical waste disposal pages.

Source: Kontv Haber, “Tıbbi ürün kaçakçılığı operasyonu” (Medical product smuggling operation), 1 July 2022. We embed the video from the publisher’s YouTube channel. All rights belong to Kontv Haber. Watch the original video on YouTube.