like, there’s actually some pretty Pure Ideology at work here in terms of people promoting ideas that show a complete misunderstanding of how criminals operate. the view of the scumbag internet pharmacy scammer seems to be that of a figure who does evil for the sake of doing evil, like they’re going to be running a literal poison vendor on the clearweb and selling you poison for no good reason besides just like, some completely irrational commitment to acting evilly for no reason, and in fact it feels almost like they just transposed the image of the shady, evil-for-no-reason drug dealer from drug war propaganda into this figure!
like, i’m sure part of the basis for this panic is the very real news of adulteration of recreational drugs, such as dealers who put fentanyl in heroin, or the selling of 25I-NBOMe under the label of LSD, but what all these dangerous scams have in common is that a customer might walk away with the adulterated drug, get high, experience similar effects to taking the real product, and then come back for more, with the danger being that some customers might just fucking die or have a bad experience with the false or adulterated drug, but that’s not the goal in and of itself, the goal is to make the person you’re scamming think what you’re selling them is legit and keep buying from you. transposing the adulterated drug logic to HRT vendors is not going to net you “they’re putting ketamine in the HRT”, it’s going to net you “these are sugar pills branded as estradiol that will take you months to realize don’t actually do anything”, since the effects of HRT take a while to manifest and in that time you might be thinking what you’re taking is legitimate and buy more of it, and will have already given a bunch of money to the scammer by the time you realize you’ve been tricked.
and i think what this all comes down is, like i said before, suburban white middle class americans legitimately not understanding how criminals act and why they act in one way or another. if you’re running a scam your goal is to make money, not to murder a whole shitload of people, and while sellers of adulterated recreational drugs might not care if you die from them, they would prefer it if you were tricked for a long enough time as to buy from them multiple times, so selling 25I-NBOMe as LSD, selling fentanyl in heroin, increasing the volume of cocaine by mixing in chalk (is that even a real thing btw), these all provide a falsely-advertised product that a customer can walk away with thinking “i bought the real thing, im gonna buy more”. putting fucking poisons in estradiol tablets means somebody will very likely immediately realize you’re tricking them, by means of getting poisoned, whereas if you just sell your customers placebos they’ll take a while before realizing the scam, that way you make more money, because that’s what scammers want, money, not to just do evil for the sake of doing evil like in some drug war propaganda video of evil drug dealers that they show to kids.
that’s why what trans women warn each other about when it comes to disreputable hrt vendors online is… placebo sellers, or pharmacies that just never ship your order, because the real risk has never been that we’ll get sold arsenic labelled “estradiol valerate”, it’s that they’ll take our money and fuck us over, and we discuss these things among each other because we’re not fucking dupes who are too dumb to understand the concept of “there’s scammers on the internet”.