A peptide seller was sentenced to 70 months. He admitted forging the certificates.

On 30 July 2026, in South Bend, Indiana, Judge Cristal Brisco sentenced Matthew Kawa to 70 months in federal prison and his sister, Jennifer Stechkober, who worked for the business, to 16 months. Both had pleaded guilty to selling unapproved drugs; Kawa also pleaded to illegally importing them. He was ordered to forfeit $5 million. The Department of Justice's own case page names the business as Paradigm Peptides, also trading as Paradigm R.E. LLC, shipping peptides, hCG and SARMs from Michigan City, Indiana. The company had 54,000 customers across all fifty states and eighty countries.

Kawa admitted that the business forged laboratory certificates to lend credibility to its products.

We published a piece last month arguing that a certificate of analysis is a lab report on a sample the seller chose, from a lab the seller paid, and that this is worth something but considerably less than buyers take it to mean. This case is the floor under that argument. The certificates here were not optimistic, or stale, or drawn from a flattering batch. They were made up. No amount of reading one carefully would have helped, because there was no test behind it to read.

The second finding is worse than the first. Prosecutors tested six products sold as SARMs, compounds marketed for their resemblance to testosterone. All six contained actual testosterone, which is a controlled substance. In his plea, Kawa admitted he 'did not test the SARM products that my business sold to customers.' Buyers were not getting a weak version of what the label said. They were getting a different drug, one that carries its own risks and its own legal exposure for the person holding it.

One correction, because we have watched it spread. A good deal of coverage attaches these two defendants to Amino Asylum, a separate vendor that went offline in 2025. The primary documents we can read name one business and it is Paradigm Peptides. We have found no primary source connecting these defendants to any other vendor, so we are not going to repeat one, and neither should the round-ups that have.

A related caution about the other closure everyone is discussing. Peptide Sciences is widely reported to have shut down in March 2026. We have not found that in a court record, a regulator's notice or a mainstream outlet, only in posts published by competing vendors. Its domain currently answers our requests with a bot challenge, which is not the same fact as being gone, and we treat those two as different questions elsewhere on this site. So we are not stating it. If a primary source appears, it will be posted here with a date.

What a single prosecution does and does not establish is worth naming. It does not show that the market is uniformly fraudulent; one convicted seller is one seller. What it does show is that the document this market runs on can be manufactured wholesale, that a business can do it across 54,000 customers for years, and that the thing which eventually surfaced it was a federal investigation with subpoena power rather than a careful buyer comparing PDFs.

Neither of the businesses named above is in our price index, and that is not a judgement we made about them. Our directory lists vendors whose published prices we can read automatically. It is a record of who is selling at what price, not a list of who we vouch for, and no entry in it should be read as a safety assessment.