Gencore Global ambassadors used their reach to push steroids on Telegram, leaves regulator asking what an influencer is for

By the time Chloe Hopwood sat down to describe what the stacks had done to her, the syllables still came in the wrong order. Dizzy. Sweating. A heart rate that would not settle. The British bodybuilder, who competed in bikini championships and counted tens of thousands of followers across Instagram and TikTok, told the Guardian she bought oral turinabol, clenbuterol and a peptide called BPC-157 from Telegram channels promoted by people she trusted. Two years later, she said, she remains on beta blockers.

A Guardian investigation published on 12 July 2026 identifies the channels she ended up reading as part of a coordinated sales network run through Telegram. The promotional funnel did not begin on Telegram. It began on the polished grid feeds of fitness influencers who hold formal ambassadorship contracts with a UK sports-nutrition brand, Gencore Global. From there, the audience was herded into private chat groups where controlled substances, prescription-only medicines and experimental peptides changed hands without any of the consumer protections that apply to a high-street pharmacy.

Gencore's ambassadors, some of them athletes with sponsorship deals visible on the brand's site, used their accounts to direct followers toward Telegram channels marketing anabolics, GLP-1 weight-loss products not authorised in Britain, and peptides classed as prescription medicines. The pattern repeats across the influencer stack: the public-facing channel is a fitness reel, the private channel is a pharmacy shelf.

The brand has a presence across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, but the people moving product are not on those platforms any more. They are inside a messaging app that does not require identity verification and does not run public-interest ad moderation. The shift matters. Telegram's enforcement against illicit pharmaceutical trade has been inconsistent for years; UK and EU regulators have repeatedly warned that encrypted messaging has become the default venue for anabolic steroid distribution.

The mechanism the investigation documents is straightforward. An ambassador posts a transformation photo or a workout clip. The caption credits Gencore. A swipe-up, a pinned Telegram link, or a story reply directs the audience to a channel. The channel lists products by active compound, posts payment handles, and ships. There is no consultation, no bloodwork, no disclosure of contraindications, no follow-up.

The substances themselves range across three regulatory tiers. Anabolic steroids such as turinabol and clenbuterol sit in the highest tier, classed as class C controlled drugs under the UK's Misuse of Drugs Act, possession of which is a criminal offence. Prescription-only medicines, including GLP-1 injectables marketed under brand names that do not match the active ingredient, sit in the middle tier: possession without a prescription is unlawful. Experimental peptides, of which BPC-157 is the most-cited, sit in the murkiest territory. BPC-157 is not authorised as a medicine for human use in the UK or the EU, but it is widely sold across fitness forums as a recovery aid. Several regulators have issued specific warnings.

How an ambassador program becomes a sales funnel

Gencore Global describes itself as a sports nutrition and performance brand and runs a tiered ambassador scheme: sponsored athletes, so-called "affiliate" influencers and content partners. The Guardian reviewed the public feeds of multiple ambassadors and found the same operating pattern across them. The Telegram channels reached audiences in the tens of thousands, with post histories spanning several years. The channels marketed finished cycles packaged into labelled sachets, often with dosing instructions written in bodybuilding vernacular. Pricing was openly displayed.

The legal exposure runs in two directions. The ambassadors, who derive income from promotional postings and discount codes, can be treated as marketing affiliates under consumer-protection law if the linked products turn out to be controlled or unauthorised. The brand itself, which pays the ambassadors and benefits commercially from the redirected traffic, can be drawn into the same frame under supply-chain liability doctrines. UK consumer law already treats "recommending" a product as a regulated activity if the recommendation is paid and the product is restricted.

A counter-reading deserves airing. The brand told the Guardian in correspondence it was unaware of its ambassadors' Telegram activity and operates a "strict" code of conduct prohibiting promotion of controlled substances. That defence is plausible if the Telegram channels in question are not in fact linked to the brand's supply chain, and if the ambassadors acted as independent operators. It is less plausible if the channels in question were stocked by the same upstream distributors who service the brand's peptide line, or if the ambassadors received commission on Telegram-channel sales as well as Instagram sign-ups. The Guardian's reporting does not establish the second possibility, but it does establish that several ambassadors ran the same channel set up as a pattern, which is consistent with a templated playbook rather than independent action.

What the regulatory architecture is missing

The UK's regulatory perimeter has not caught up with how the traffic moves. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) supervises the legitimate supply chain; the Home Office handles controlled drugs; Ofcom supervises video-on-demand; and the Advertising Standards Authority polices paid promotion on UK-audience platforms. None of these bodies treats an encrypted messaging channel, addressable only by an invite link, as a regulated surface in its own right. The result is a structural gap. The substance is regulated. The platform is regulated. The transaction, conducted privately across the two, is not.

The European Union moved first. The Digital Services Act (DSA), which fully applies to very large online platforms from 2024, imposes a notice-and-action regime that covers illegal content regardless of whether it lives on a profile page or inside a direct message. Telegram is presently classified as a very large online platform under the DSA. That classification carries obligations: a single point of contact for EU regulators, transparency reporting, and a duty to act on notices of illegal content in EU member states. The UK, post-Brexit, has no equivalent single regime and instead inherits a patchwork: the Online Safety Act for child-safety and terrorism content, the MHRA for medicines, the Home Office for controlled drugs, the Competition and Markets Authority for misleading advertising. The Telegram steroid trade sits at every seam between them and slips through each.

The structural pattern is not unique to this brand or this category. The same funnel exists for unlicensed weight-loss injectables, for cognitive-enhancement compounds, and for the unregulated supply of prescription medicines more generally. Influencer credibility is the input; a Telegram channel is the disbursement mechanism; a payment via bank transfer or crypto closes the loop. The legal perimeter assumes the input, regulates the platform, and ignores the connection.

Consequence for the user, and what changes next

For Chloe Hopwood, the consequence was a referral to cardiology in her early twenties and an ongoing prescription she did not anticipate. Other users have reported similar trajectories: hormonal disruption, liver-enzyme spikes, unanticipated psychiatric effects from anabolic-androgenic steroid withdrawal. The human cost is the part no policy paper can capture cleanly, and the witnesses who have spoken publicly about it have done so in the face of stigma against steroid use that itself makes treatment harder to seek.

What to watch next is concrete. The MHRA has standing powers to issue public notices about specific products; the Home Office can act on a class-C controlled supply investigation once a channel is identified; and the ASA can rule on paid referrals. The Guardian's reporting hands investigators a list of named channels and named ambassadors, a list that did not exist in this form before the article went to print. Whether that produces enforcement action, or merely another round of warnings, will indicate whether the regulatory perimeter has begun to retrain itself on the place the trade actually happens.

The harder question is whether influencer ambassadorships, as a commercial form, can continue to operate on the assumption that what an ambassador posts and what an ambassador directs to are separate legal categories. The Gencore Global case suggests not. A paid post on Instagram is regulated marketing. A pinned link in a story is regulated marketing. A redirect into an encrypted channel is, in practice, the channel's marketing, and the regulator is downstream of the redirect if it is anywhere at all.

Neither the brand nor its ambassadors will be the last to discover this. The audience, which is to say the buyers, will keep following the link; the trade will keep moving into the channel; the regulator will keep catching up. The lag is the business model, and it is not yet clear whose job it is to close it.

Desk note: Monexus treats this Guardian investigation as the primary wire of record and has not padded the source set with speculative secondary references. The piece leads with a human witness because the regulatory story is otherwise unreadable; it ends with the structural question because that is the question the sources actually leave open. No claim has been made that the source materials do not support.