What we read
The public Janoshik test history for retatrutide, semaglutide, and tirzepatide samples between December 2024 and April 2026; FDA-cited court filings for the Paradigm Peptides federal case (December 2025); contemporaneous r/Peptides threads from the 90 days preceding each of the three vendor shutdowns; and post-shutdown reporting on The Peptide Catalog and Muscle and Brawn. This is a forensic synthesis, not a first-hand audit.
The shutdown cadence
Three of the top five US peptide vendors by traffic ceased operations between June 2025 and March 2026 — a roughly four-month cadence at the top of the market. The closures were not the result of a single regulatory action; each ended for different formal reasons. The underlying pattern is what the public data shows in common. See also our FDA peptide-enforcement timeline for the regulatory backdrop behind these closures.
| Vendor | Closed | Cause cited | Pre-warning visible? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amino Asylum | June 2025 | FDA raid; SARMs with testosterone | Partially |
| Paradigm Peptides | Mar 2024 (operations); plea Dec 2025; sentenced 30 Jul 2026 | Unapproved new drugs with intent to defraud; forged lab certificates; SARMs containing testosterone | Yes - FDA warning letters 2020 and 2022 |
| Peptide Sciences | March 6, 2026 | Quality collapse + federal pressure | Yes |
Case 1: Amino Asylum — June 2025
The federal charges that triggered the FDA raid concerned SARMs labeled products that contained testosterone — a controlled substance under 21 U.S.C. § 802(41). The peptide catalog was not the formal subject of the action.
Pre-shutdown signals that were visible:
- COA practices were inconsistent across product lines, with several product pages publishing what appeared to be the same generic in-house certificate dated months earlier than the order.
- Multiple r/Peptides threads in early 2025 flagged the SARM-line products with chemistries that did not match label.
- The vendor's response to community challenges was customer-service silence rather than substantive correction.
Pre-shutdown signals that were not visible:
- The internal compliance state that drew federal attention.
- The specific SKU that triggered the testing referral.
For an outside observer with only public data, the SARM-line discrepancies were a yellow flag for at least three months before the raid. Whether they constituted a predictable signal of a federal action specifically is harder to claim — federal enforcement timing is not observable from outside.
Case 2: Paradigm Peptides — operations ceased March 2024, sentenced July 2026
Paradigm is the case with a full public record attached, because it went all the way to sentencing. Operations ceased in March 2024 during a federal investigation. Owner Matthew Kawa and his sister Jennifer Stechkober pleaded guilty in 2025, and on 30 July 2026 Kawa was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison with a $5 million money judgment. Stechkober received 16 months. The court ordered $78,317.52 in restitution.
The charge was not what we originally recorded. Both pleaded to introducing unapproved new drugs into interstate commerce with intent to defraud and mislead, which describes the business rather than a single product line. Kawa admitted the company forged laboratory certificates, did not test products before selling them, and imported from China and India while advertising US manufacture. Government testing of six compounds sold as SARMs found all six contained testosterone.
Pre-shutdown signals that were visible:
- FDA warning letters in 2020 and 2022, published in a free public database, telling Kawa he was selling unapproved drugs. He sold for another two years.
- The same SARMs-versus-controlled-substance pattern that Amino Asylum had been raided for.
The learning here is sharper than the one we drew from Amino Asylum. The forged certificates mean that no amount of reading Paradigm's published COAs would have caught this. Only a check that routed around the vendor would have, and the warning-letter database is exactly that. We wrote up the verification method separately in forged COAs and a 70-month sentence.
Case 3: Peptide Sciences — March 6, 2026
Peptide Sciences was the most-recommended vendor on r/Peptides for most of the 2024–2025 window. Their closure was both the largest by reader impact and the one where the public COA data most clearly anticipated the shutdown.
The Janoshik record for Peptide Sciences retatrutide samples between December 2024 and March 2026 shows 37 tested samples with results that progressively diverged from label claims, including at least one batch that returned a mass-spec identity result inconsistent with retatrutide. The community discussion on r/Peptides escalated through the back half of 2025, with multiple users posting Janoshik QRs showing under-spec purity on what were marketed as premium SKUs.
Federal pressure followed the quality collapse rather than preceding it. The shutdown itself happened with little notice but the trailing data trend was visible to anyone reading the public Janoshik database in mid-2025.
What the data shows in common
Across the three closures, four signals appeared in some combination:
- Sustained adverse Janoshik results on flagship SKUs (visible for Peptide Sciences; less so for Amino Asylum, where the SARM-line was the catalyst).
- Inconsistent COA cadence — vendors switching between batch-specific and generic certificates as scrutiny increased.
- Customer-service silence on substantive product challenges, replaced by promotional response patterns.
- Catalog overlap with already-actioned vendors in the SARM category specifically.
None of these is a single-shot prediction. In combination, sustained across 60–90 days, they constitute a reasonable risk signal for the audit-side observer.
Reader checklist
If you are about to place a recurring order with a vendor:
- Pull the last 90 days of Janoshik public tests for the SKUs you buy most. If the trend across 5+ samples shows declining purity or inconsistent identity, treat the vendor as elevated-risk regardless of their headline COA.
- Check if the catalog includes SARMs marketed alongside peptides. Two of the three closures came through the SARM/controlled-substance side of mixed catalogs. Pure-peptide vendors carried less of this shutdown risk in 2025–2026.
- Watch customer-service tone on substantive challenges. Vendors that respond promotionally to specific product questions are showing a discipline gap that often precedes other discipline gaps.
What we did not read
We do not have access to vendor-internal compliance documentation, non-public sealed court filings, or the full chain-of-custody for the Janoshik samples we cite. The next iteration of this piece will benefit from r/Peptides moderator-side data on which threads were removed for defamation claims — a useful proxy for vendor-side legal pressure that is invisible from the reader-facing forum.